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A  HISTOKICAL  INTEODUCTION 


TO  THE    STUDY  OF  THE 


BOOKS  OF  THE  NEW  TESTAMENT: 


BEING 


AN  EXPANSION  OF  LECTUEES 


DELIVERED    IN    THE 


DIVINITY  SCHOOL  OF  THE  UNIVERSITY  OF  DUBLIN 


BY  GEOKGKE  SALMON,  D.D.,  F.E.S., 

PROVOST   OF    TRINITY   COLLEGE,    DUBLIN  ; 
SOMETIME    REGIUS   PROFESSOR    OF    DIVINITY    IN    THE    UNIVERSITY    OF    DUBLIN. 


FOURTH     EDITION, 


LONDON: 

JOHN    MURRAY,    ALBEMARLE    STREET. 
1889. 


BY    THE    SAME    AUTHOR. 


THE  INFALLIBILITY  OF  THE  CHURCH: 

$   ®mtrse  of  Lectures 

DELIVERED   IN    THE 

DIVINITY  SCHOOL  OF  THE  UNIVERSITY  OF  DUBLIN. 
8vo.    Price  12a. 


Printed  at  THK  UMVKRSITY  PRESS,  Dublin. 


PREFACE 

TO    THE    FIRST    EDITION 


THE  Lectures  out  of  which  the  present  volume  has 
taken  its  origin  were  written  some  years  ago, 
and  did  not  aim  at  giving  a  complete  or  systematic 
account  of  the  subjects  with  which  they  dealt.  When 
I  decided  last  year  on  sending  them  to  the  Press,  I 
contemplated  making  no  other  change  than  that  of 
altering  the  division  into  Lectures  —  the  original 
division,  of  necessity,  having  mainly  had  regard  to 
the  length  which  it  was  convenient  to  deliver  at  one 
time.  Accordingly,  the  first  three  Lectures  of  this 
volume  contain,  with  but  slight  alterations,  what 
was  originally  the  introductory  Lecture  of  my  course. 
But  as  the  printing  went  on  I  found  additions  ne 
cessary,  partly  in  order  to  take  notice  of  things  that 
had  been  published  since  the  delivery  of  the  Lectures, 
and  partly  in  order  to  include  details  which  want  of 
time  had  obliged  me  to  omit,  but  which  I  was  un 
willing  to  pass  unnoticed  in  my  book.  In  this  way 
I  have  been  led  on  to  re-write,  and  make  additions 
(but  without  making  any  change  in  the  style  or  in 
the  arrangement),  until  I  am  now  somewhat  dis 
mayed  to  find  that  the  Lectures  have  swelled  to  two 
or  three  times  their  original  bulk. 


iv  PREFACE. 

The  additions  thus  made  have  so  far  completed  the 
discussion,  that  I  have  ventured  to  give  this  volume 
the  title  of  an  Introduction  ;  but  it  will  be  seen  that  it 
does  not  embrace  all  the  topics  frequently  included 
under  that  title.  I  do  not  enter  on  the  criticism  of  the 
text,  nor  do  I  make  any  analysis  of  the  contents  of  the 
books.  My  main  purpose  has  been  to  discuss  their 
date  and  authorship  on  purely  historical  grounds ; 
and  to  examine  with  sufficient  completeness  for  a 
practical  decision  the  various  theories  on  the  subject 
advanced  by  modern  schools  of  criticism.  It  is  in 
this  latter  respect  that  this  Introduction  will  chiefly 
be  found  to  differ  from  some  valuable  works  on  the 
same  subject  which  are  in  the  hands  of  students. 
Most  of  the  original  evidence  requisite  for  the  dis 
cussion  has  already  been  brought  within  easy  reach 
in  Canon  Westcott's  'History  of  the  New  Testament 
Canon/  Dr.  Charteris,  also,  in  his  '  Canonicity/  has 
rendered  accessible  to  the  English  reader  the  collec 
tion  of  ancient  testimonies  made  by  Kirchhofer  in  his 
'  Quellensammlung.'  According  to  the  arrangement 
of  Canon  Westcott's  book,  each  of  the  ancient  wit 
nesses  is  treated  separately,  and  under  each  name  are 
placed  the  books  of  the  New  Testament  to  which  the 
witness  bears  testimony.  According  to  the  arrange 
ment  of  Kirchhofer  and  Charteris,  each  book  of  the 
New  Testament  is  examined  in  succession,  and  the 
ancient  writers  are  cited  who  bear  testimony  to  it.  The 
latter  is  the  arrangement  I  have  followed.  I  do  not 
always  give  as  full  a  report  of  the  evidence  as  the 
authors  just  mentioned  have  done,  contenting  myself 
with  citing  as  many  witnesses  as  I  judge  to  be  suf- 


PREFACE.  V 

ficient  to  prove  my  case.  But  on  the  other  hand,  as  I 
have  said,  I  aim  at  giving  a  somewhat  fuller  discussion 
than  they  have  done  of  the  theories  of  authorship  which 
modern  sceptical  writers  have  proposed  to  substitute 
for  the  traditional  belief  of  the  Christian  Church. 
The  time  has  passed  when  it  could  be  objected  that  a 
student's  time  was  ill-spent  in  becoming  acquainted 
with  such  theories,  on  the  ground  that  he  probably 
would  never  have  heard  of  them  if  he  had  not  been 
asked  to  study  the  refutation.  Literature  in  which 
the  theories  in  question  are  treated  as  established 
facts  has  now  obtained  such  extensive  circulation, 
that  a  clergyman  must  be  pronounced  ill-trained  for 
his  work  if  he  has  to  make  his  first  acquaintance  with 
these  speculations  when  he  finds  them  accepted  among 
his  people  as  the  latest  results  of  scientific  inquiry. 

Although  my  work  may  be  described  as  apologetic 
in  the  sense  that  its  results  agree  in  the  main  with 
the  traditional  belief  of  the  Church,  I  can  honestly 
say  that  I  have  not  worked  in  the  spirit  of  an  advo 
cate  anxious  to  defend  a  foregone  conclusion.  I  have 
aimed  at  making  my  investigations  historical,  and  at 
asserting  nothing  but  what  the  evidence,  candidly 
weighed,  seemed  to  warrant.  It  would  be  idle  in 
anyone  to  pretend  that  he  can  wholly  divest  himself 
of  bias  ;  but  I  must  remark  that  the  temptation  to 
hold  obstinately  to  traditional  opinions  is  one  to 
which  those  who  are  called  apologists  are  not  ex 
clusively  liable.  The  theories  which  in  these  Lectures 
I  have  found  myself  obliged  to  reject  are  now  some 
fifty  years  old.  They  are  maintained  by  a  generation 
of  scholars  who  have  accepted  them  on  the  authority 


VI  PREFACE. 

of  guides  to  whom,  in  their  youthful  days,  they  looked 
up  with  reverence,  and  whose  dicta  they  regard  it 
as  presumptuous  to  dispute,  receiving  their  doctrines 
with  something  like  the  blind  submission  which  the 
teachers  of  the  scholastic  philosophy  gave  to  the 
decisions  of  the  Fathers.  The  temptation  to  apply 
unfairly  the  methods  of  historical  criticism  besets  as 
strongly  the  opponents  as  the  assertors  of  the  super 
natural.  The  former  have  found  great  difficulties  in 
maintaining  their  position  by  a  priori  proof  of  the 
impossibility  of  miracle  ;  for  what  they  seek  to  estab 
lish  really  amounts  to  this  :  that,  even  if  God  exists, 
it  is  beyond  the  power  of  His  Omnipotence  to  give 
His  creatures  convincing  proof  of  His  existence. 
Failing  to  gain  many  converts  to  this  doctrine,  they 
have  tried  another  method  of  attaining  their  object : 
namely,  by  a  criticism  directed  to  show  that  the  docu 
ments  tendered  for  the  establishment  of  miracles  are 
so  late  as  to  be  undeserving  of  attention.  But  the 
attempt  to  show  this  has,  in  my  opinion,  broken 
down,  as  I  have  endeavoured  to  prove  in  the  fol 
lowing  pages.  If  this  result  has  been  established,  it 
must  follow  that  the  opponents  of  the  supernatural 
will  be  forced  to  fall  back  on  their  older  methods. 

I  have  thankfully  to  acknowledge  kind  help  given 
me  in  reading  the  proofs  by  my  friends  Professor 
MAHAFFY,  Dr.  QUARRY,  and  Dr.  WAGE,  to  each  of 
whom  I  owe  some  useful  suggestions.  But  my  chief 
acknowledgments  are  due  to  my  colleague  in  our 
Divinity  School,  Dr.  GWYNN,  who  has  taken,  on  my 
behalf,  an  amount  of  trouble  which,  if  I  were  not 
somewhat  ashamed  of  having  imposed  so  much 


PREFACE.  Vll 

labour  on  him,  would  make  me  congratulate  myself 
that  the  publication  of  my  Lectures  was  delayed 
until  I  could  have  the  benefit  of  his  assistance.  In 
addition  to  most  careful  reading  of  all  the  proofs, 
he  has  been  ever  ready  to  consult  authorities,  and 
verify  references  for  me,  a  service  which  was  parti 
cularly  useful  to  me  during  three  months  that  I  was 
at  a  distance  from  books ;  and  he  has,  besides,  made 
some  special  investigations  on  my  account,  such  as 
those  which  I  have  particularly  acknowledged,  pp. 
349,  549,  557,  595- 


Readers  who  may  compare  the  present  with  former 
editions  of  this  work  will  perhaps  find  it  convenient  if 
I  specify  a  few  places  where  changes  or  additions  are 
now  made.  I  have  added  (p.  44)  a  note  on  Zahn's 
speculation  concerning  the  date  of  the  Latin  Version 
of  the  New  Testament :  some  slight  addition  is  made 
(p.  86)  to  what  had  been  said  about  Tatian's  Diates- 
saron  :  Dr.  Gwynn's  discovery  of  fragments  of  Caius 
has  made  some  change  necessary  in  what  had  been 
said  (p.  227)  about  Caius's  reception  of  the  Apocalypse, 
and  about  the  Alogi :  in  a  note  (p.  255)  I  have  dis 
cussed  Vischer's  assault  on  the  unity  of  the  Apoca 
lypse  :  something  has  been  added  (p.  389)  with  regard 
to  the  date  of  the  formation  of  a  collection  of  Pauline 
letters,  and  a  fuller  discussion  than  before  of  the 
second  group  of  Pauline  Epistles  has  been  given 
(p.  403).  On  the  other  hand,  I  have  judged  it  suf 
ficient  to  present,  in  an  abridged  form  (p.  545),  my 


Vlll  PREFACE. 

examination  of  Dr.  Abbott's  censures  of  the  style  of 
2  Peter,  which  in  the  first  and  subsequent  editions 
was  given  with  more  detail  than  now  appears  to  be 
requisite.  The  change  of  form  of  the  book,  and  the 
consequent  alteration  in  the  paging,  has  rendered 
necessary  the  preparation  of  a  new  Index  ;  and 
though  I  have  taken  a  good  deal  of  pains,  I  fear  it 
is  too  much  to  expect  that  I  shall  have  altogether 
escaped  misprints  and  false  references  both  in  the 
Index  and  elsewhere. 

TRINITY  COLLEGE,  DUBLIN, 
October,  1889. 


ERRATA. 

Page  209,  line  i8,for  i  John  v.  24,  read  i  John  v.  20. 
„     326,  line  5  from  foot,  for  v.  30,  read  v.  39. 
>>     397)  note  line  2,  for  2  Cor.  i.  17,  read  2  Cor.  ii.  17. 
„     487,  note  line  4,  for  Rom.  iv.  7,  read  Rom.  vi.  7. 
»     494>  lme  15>  for  James  iii.,  read  James  ii. 
,,     495,  line  3  from  foot,  for  Genesis  xvii.,  read  Genesis  xviii. 


CO  NTENTS. 

LECTURE  I. 

INTRODUCTORY.      PART  I. 

Page 

PRINCIPLES  OF  THE  INVESTIGATION  i 

Subject  of  Lectures  defined,  pp.  I,  2.  Question  of  Inspiration 
irrelevant  here,  p.  3  ;  amount  of  external  evidence  of  authen 
ticity  commonly  required  in  similar  cases,  pp.  4 — 5  ;  authenticity 
of  N.  T.  books  not  to  be  denied  because  of  the  miraculous 
nature  of  their  contents,  pp.  6 — 8.  Criticism  based  on  the 
rejection  of  the  supernatural;  Strauss,  Renan,  author  of  Super 
natural  Religion, ^.<),  10.  Naturalistic  explanation  of  Gospel 
Miracles:  Paulus,  p.  II  ;  Strauss's  Theory,  p.  12. 


LECTURE  II. 

INTRODUCTORY.      PART  II. 

BAUR'S  THEORY  OF  EARLY  CHURCH  HISTORY  . 

The  Tubingen  (or  'Tendency')  School,  p.  13  ;  its  basis  in  the 
Clementine  writings,  pp.  14 — 16  ;  St.  Paul  assailed  in  them 
under  name  of  Simon  Magus,  p.  16.  Marcion,  ib.  The 
Paul-Simon  theory,  pp.  17 — 19.  Two  kinds  of  Ebionites,  pp. 
18,  19.  Wholesale  rejection  of  N.T.  books  necessary  to  Baur's 
theory,  p.  20;  the  search  for  anti-Paulinism  in  the  Gospels, 
p.  '2i ;  unsuccessful,  pp.  22,  23  ;  Baur  admits  but  five  N.  T. 
books  as  genuine,  p.  23  ;  internecine  character  of  strife  in  early 
Church  as  alleged  by  him,  p.  24  ;  its  speedy  and  complete 
reconciliation,  p.  25. 


X  CONTENTS. 

LECTURE  III. 

INTRODUCTORY.      PART   III. 

Page 

THE  ANTI-PAULINISM  OF  THE  APOCALYPSE         .        .       25 

Alleged  anti-Paulinism  of  the  Epistles  to  the  Seven  Churches, 
pp.  26,  27;  improbability  of  this  view,  pp.  28,29.  The  call 
ing  of  the  Gentiles  recognized  in  the  Apocalypse,  p.  29 ;  its 
alleged  anti-Pauline  language  paralleled  in  Paul's  own  writings, 
pp.  30,  31.  Rapidity  of  supposed  counter-revolution  in  favour 
of  Paulinism,  p.  32. 


LECTURE   IV. 

RECEPTION  OF  THE  GOSPELS  IN  THE  EARLY 
CHURCH.      PART  I. 

THE    END    OF    THE    SECOND    CENTURY  ;   IREN^EUS, 

CLEMENT,  AND  TERTULLIAN      .         .         .         -33 

Paul's  teaching,  as  collected  from  his  unquestioned  Epistles, 
and  from  the  Acts,  p.  33  ;  assumes  the  fact  of  the  Resurrection, 
p.  34 ;  includes  miracle,  p.  35.  Facts  admitted  by  Strauss  as 
to  reception  of  Gospels,  ib.  IREN^US,  pp.  35 — 40;  links 
connecting  him  with  Apostolic  age,  p.  36  ;  estimate  of  the 
Four  Gospels  in  the  Church  of  his  age,  pp.  36 — 38  ;  his  testi 
mony  retrospective,  pp.  38—40.  CLEMENT  of  Alexandria, 
pp.  41,  42 ;  various  texts  of  the  Gospels,  p.  41  ;  inference  from 
this  fact,  p.  42;  TERTULLIAN,  pp.  42 — 44.  Early  Latin  version 
of  Scriptures,  p.  42  ;  rendering  of  title  « Logos,'  p.  45.  Discus 
sion  of  Zahn's  theory  that  the  Latin  translation  is  later  than 
Tertullian,  pp.  44 — 47. 


LECTURE   V. 

RECEPTION  OF  THE  GOSPELS   IN  THE  EARLY 
CHURCH.      PART  II. 

THE  MURATORIAN   FRAGMENT  ;  CAIUS   AND   HIPPO- 

LYTUS 47 

THE  MURATORIAN  FRAGMENT,  pp.  48 — 54;  described,  pp. 
48,  49 ;  its  date,  how  determined,  Hernias,  ib.  ;  conjectures 
as  to  its  author,  pp.  51 — 53  ;  its  contents,  pp.  53,  54;  whether 


CONTENTS.  XI 

Page 

St.  Jerome  was  acquainted  with  it,  p.  54.  CAIUS  and  HIP- 
POLYTUS,  pp.  55 — 62.  Caius,  p.  55  ;  his  estimate  of  the 
Gospels,  pp.  56,  57.  Hippolytus,  p.  57  ;  his  'Refutation  of 
Heresies,'  pp.  57,  58  ;  his  extracts  from  heretical  writers,  p.  58; 
use  made  by  these  of  N.  T.  books,  p.  59  ;  especially  of  Fourth 
Gospel,  ib.  ;  by  Valentinus,  pp.  59 — 61  ;  by  Basilides,  pp. 
6r,  62.  First  mention  of  St.  John  as  author  of  this  Gospel, 
p.  62  ;  it  tacitly  claims  him  as  such,  ib. ;  but  does  not  men 
tion  his  name,  ib. 


LECTURE  VI. 

RECEPTION   OF   THE   GOSPELS  IN  THE  EARLY 
CHURCH.      PART  III. 

THE    MIDDLE    OF   THE    SECOND    CENTURY;    JUSTIN 

MARTYR,  TATIAN 63 

JUSTIN  MARTYR,  pp.  63—82 ;  his  date,  p.  64 ;  mentions  and 
cites  'Memoirs'  of  our  Lord,  pp.  65,  66;  his  citations  vary 
verbally  from  the  existing  Gospels,  pp.  66 — 67  ;  his  substantial 
agreement  with  the  Synoptic  Gospels,  pp.  67 — 70  ;  his  inac 
curacy  in  quoting  the  Old  Testament,  p.  69  ;  improbability  that 
he  used  a  Gospel  now  lost,  p.  70 ;  whether  he  used  apocryphal 
Gospels,  p.  71  ;  proofs  that  he  knew  the  Fourth  Gospel,  pp. 
71 — 80;  Thoma's  theory,  Dr.  Ezra  Abbot,  p.  72  ;  Justin  derives 
from  Fourth  Gospel  his  'Logos'  doctrine,  pp.  72,  73;  not 
from  Philo,  p.  74  ;  hence  also  his  baptismal  language,  pp. 
74 — 76;  Fourth  Gospel  used  in  the  Clementines,  p.  76;  Strauss's 
failure  to  shake  these  conclusions,  pp.  75—77  ;  Dr.  Edwin 
Abbott's  views  untenable,  pp.  78,  79 ;  Renan's  inconsistency 
on  this  subject,  pp.  78—80.  TATIAN,  pp.  81— 86;  his  date 
and  heresy,  p.  81  ;  his  knowledge  of  Fourth  Gospel,  ib.  ; 
his  '  Diatessaron,'  pp.  82 — 86  ;  recent  recovery  of  Commen 
tary  on  it  by  Ephraem  Syrus,  pp.  84,  85 ;  its  ample  attesta 
tion  of  the  Fourth  Gospel  equally  with  the  others,  p.  86. 
Other  helps  towards  restoring  the  Diatessaron,  ib. 


Xll  CONTENTS. 


LECTURE   VII. 

RECEPTION  OF  THE   GOSPELS    IN   THE  EARLY 
CHURCH.      PART  IV. 

Page 
THE   BEGINNING  OF  THE  SECOND  CENTURY;   PAPIAS, 

APOSTOLIC  FATHERS 87 

PAPIAS,  pp.  87 — 105  ;  his  remains  scanty  and  fragmentary, 
p.  87  ;  unfair  inferences  from  the  silence  of  Eusebius,  pp.  88, 
89  ;  Papias's  '  Exposition  of  the  Oracles  of  the  Lord,'  p.  90  ;  his 
sources  of  information,  pp.  90,  91  ;  his  witness  to  the  Gospels  of 
Matthew  and  Mark,  p.  92  ;  recent  doubts  of  the  identity  of 
these  with  our  first  and  second  Gospels,  pp.  93 — 95.  Argu 
ment  from  the  silence  of  Eusebius,  p.  95.  Schleiermacher's 
theory  of  the  'original'  Matthew  and  Mark,  ib.\  Renan's 
theory  of  their  formation,  pp.  96,  97.  Meaning  of  the  word 
'Logia'  in  Papias's  account  of  Matthew,  pp.  98,  99  ;  explana 
tion  of  his  apology  for  Mark's  method,  pp.  99,  IOO ;  probability 
that  Papias  knew  Luke's  Gospel,  pp.  101 — 103  ;  true  explana 
tion  of  plan  of  Papias's  work,  pp.  103 — 105  ;  whether  he  pre 
ferred  his  traditions  to  the  written  Gospels,  p.  104  ;  probability 
that  he  knew  John's  Gospel,  p.  105.  THE  APOSTOLIC 
FATHERS,  pp.  106—108.  Clement  of  Rome,  p.  106.  The 
early  Fathers  do  not  cite  the  Gospels  by  name,  nor  verbally, 
ib.  •  Barnabas,  pp.  107,  108. 


LECTURE   VIII. 

THE   SYNOPTIC   GOSPELS.      PART  I. 
INTERNAL  EVIDENCE  OF  THEIR  ANTIQUITY         .        .109 

Inferences  from  the  titles  of  the  Gospels,  pp.  109 — 1 1 1 ;  use  of  the 
word  in  the  singular  and  in  the  plural  number,  p.  no ;  written 
Gospels  necessary  from  the  first,  pp.  in,  112.  Our  Lord's 
discourses  as  reported  by  the  Synoptists,  p.  113  ;  presumption 
that  these  would  be  written  down  at  an  early  date,  pp.  114,  115  ; 
this  presumption  extends  to  the  narrative  of  his  actions,  p.  115. 
These  three  narratives  not  independent,  pp.  116 — 118;  the 
sceptical  criticism  is  tending  to  revert  to  the  early  date  claimed 
for  them,  p.  118  ;  no  earlier  Gospel  extant,  p.  119;  the  four 


CONTENTS.  Xlll 

Page 

took  their  place  without  authoritative  decision  of  Church,  p. 
120;  Luke's  account  explains  the  oral  common  basis  of  the 
Synoptics,  ib.  ;  he  mentions  written  narrations  prior  to  his 
own,  p.  121  ;  no  authentic  tradition  as  to  their  publication, 
p.  122.  Early  necessity  for  authoritative  records,  pp.  123 — 125. 
Gospels  once  published  and  accepted  not  easily  changed, 
pp.  125—127. 


LECTURE    IX. 

THE   SYNOPTIC   GOSPELS.      PART  II. 
THEORIES  AS  TO  THEIR  ORIGIN          ,        .        .        .127 

Inquiry  not  precluded  by  belief  in  Inspiration,  pp.  127,  128; 
though  difficult  not  hopeless,  p.  128.  Three  chief  hypotheses  to 
account  for  the  common  matter  of  the  Synoptists,  p.  129; 
various  combinations  of  these,  ib.  ;  each  hypothesis  to  be 
examined  irrespectively  of  theories  of  Inspiration,  pp.  130 — 132. 
Alford's  objection  to  First  and  Second  Hypotheses,  p.  132  ; 
verbal  variations  from  documents  in  secular  authors,  p.  133; 
variations  in  narratives  of  St.  Paul's  conversion,  ib.  The 
Third  hypothesis  will  account  for  agreements  in  narrating  of 
incidents,  p.  135  ;  but  the  First  or  Second  is  needed  to  account 
for  agreement  in  order  of  narration,  pp.  136,  137  ;  absence 
of  agreement  in  order  of  discourses,  p.  138.  Gospels  of 
Matthew  and  Luke  independent  of  one  another,  p.  139. 
Various  forms  of  Second  hypothesis,  p.  140;  inadmissible 
modifications  of  it,  p.  141.  Modifications  of  Third  hypo 
thesis,  ib.  Hypothesis  of  Hebrew  common  document,  pp. 
141,  142  ;  will  account  for  verbal  variations,  pp.  142,  143. 
Hypothesis  of  common  Greek  original  required  by  verbal 
coincidences,  p.  144 ;  and  by  common  citations  of  O.  T., 
p.  145.  Further  elaboration  of  hypothesis  of  Greek  original, 
p.  146.  Rushbrooke's  '  Synopticon,'  p.  147.  Dr.  Edwin 
Abbott  and  the  'Triple  Tradition,'  pp.  147 — 150  ;  his  theory 
of  the  common  documents  rests  on  an  inadmissible  assump 
tion,  p.  149.  The  Synoptists'  narratives  of  the  Passion, 
p.  150.  The  '  Triple  Tradition  '  rests  on  a  single  attestation, 
p.  152  ;  which  probably  is  that  of  Peter,  pp.  153,  154;  traces 
of  his  testimony  in  Mark,  pp.  154,  155.  Mark  represents  the 
original  source  most  closely,  p.  155  ;  but  is  possibly  latest  in 
publication,  p.  156;  Matthew  and  Luke  did  not  copy  Markr 
ib. ;  Mark's  last  twelve  verses,  pp.  156 — 164. 


XIV  CONTENTS. 

Page 

NOTE  ON  THE  CONCLUDING  VERSES   OF   ST.  MARK'S 

GOSPEL 158 

Early  testimony  to  their  authenticity,  pp.  158,  159.  The  tes 
timony  of  the  two  great  uncials,  pp.  159 — 161.  Improbability 
involved  in  the  rejection  of  the  verses,  pp.  163,  164.  Some 
questions  of  textual  criticism  cannot  now  be  decided  with 
certainty,  p.  164. 

LECTURE   X. 

THE   ORIGINAL  LANGUAGE   OF   ST.    MATTHEW. 
THE  HEBREW  GOSPEL .165 

Existence  of  an  early  Hebrew  Gospel  probable,  pp.  165,  166. 
Early  Patristic  evidence  that  Matthew  wrote  in  Hebrew,  p.  167. 
"Witness  of  Papias,  Irenseus,  and  Eusebius,  ib.  ;  of  Jerome 
and  Epiphanius,  p.  168.  Internal  counter-evidence,  pp.  169, 
170.  No  Greek  text  other  than  ours  known  to  the  Fathers, 
pp.  170,  171.  Hypothesis  of  a  two-fold  original,  p.  171.  The 
4  Hebrew  Gospel,'  p.  172;  not  identical  with  the  '  Ebionite 
Gospel,'  pp.  172 — 176;  not  the  source  of  the  Clementine  quo 
tations,  pp.  176,  177.  Jerome's  'Nazarene'  Gospel  not  the 
original  of  Matthew,  pp.  177 — 186.  Origen's  evidence  con 
cerning  the  'Hebrew  Gospel,'  pp.  179 — i8r;  Jerome's  incon 
sistency,  pp.  182 — 184;  estimate  of  the  value  and  age  of  this 
Gospel,  pp.  184 — 186  ;  first  trace  of  it  found  in  Ignatius,  p.  186  ; 
it  was  used  by  Hegesippus,  ib.  Palestine  was  bilingual,  pp. 
187 — 189.  Greek  original  of  St.  Matthew  on  the  whole  more 
probable,  pp.  189,  190. 


LECTURE   XL 

APOCRYPHAL  AND  HERETICAL  GOSPELS      .        .        .191 

Hone's  collection  of  N.  T.  Apocrypha,  pp.  191 — 193  ;  Hilgen- 
feld's,  pp.  192,  193.  APOCRYPHAL  GOSPELS,  pp.  193 — 201. 
The  Protevangelium,  pp.  193 — 196  ;  its  antiquity,  p.  195.  The 
pseudo- Matthew,  p.  197.  The  Gospel  of  2"homas,  pp.  197 — 
199;  its  legends  of  our  Lord's  childhood,  pp.  198,  199;  its  date, 
p.  199.  The  Gospel  of  Nicodemus  and  Acts  of  'Pilate,  pp.  200, 
201.  Evangelic  fragments,  p.  201.  HERETICAL  GOSPELS,  pp. 
202 — 208 ;  were  chiefly  Gnostic  and  Encratite,  p.  203.  Gospel 
of  the  Egyptians,  ib.  Gospel  of  Marcion,  pp.  204 — 208 ; 
Tertullian's  examination  of  it,  p.  205  ;  reconstruction  of  it, 
pp.  205,  206  ;  attempt  to  make  it  out  prior  to  Luke's,  p.  206; 
also  to  John's,  pp.  207,  208. 


CONTENTS.  XV 


LECTURE   XII. 

THE  JOHANNINE   BOOKS.      PART  I. 

Page 
THE  FOURTH  GOSPEL   .  ....    209 

Common  authorship  of  this  Gospel  and  First  Epistle,  p.  209 ; 
motive  for  questioning  this  fact,  pp.  210,  211.  Early  ex 
ternal  testimony  to  the  Epistle,  pp.  211,  212.  Baur  assigns 
a  late  date  to  the  Gospel,  p.  212  ;  his  followers  tend  to  place  it 
earlier,  ib.  ;  Renan  takes  an  exceptional  line,  pp.  212 — 214. 
Motives  for  denying  its  Apostolic  authorship,  p.  215;  its 
witness  to  our  Lord's  Divinity,  ib. ;  to  His  self-assertion,  p. 
216.  His  self-assertion  attested  by  the  Synoptics  likewise, 
pp.  217,  218.  Apocalypse  admitted  to  be  John's,  p.  218. 
Christology  of  the  Apocalypse,  pp.  219,  220.  Christology 
of  St.  Paul's  Epistles,  p.  221.  St.  John's  doctrine  compared 
with  St.  Paul's,  p.  222.  Dr.  Pfleiderer  on  the  Christology  of 
Apocalypse,  p.  223. 


LECTURE   XIII. 

THE  JOHANNINE  BOOKS.   PART  II. 

THE  FOURTH  GOSPEL  AND  THE  APOCALYPSE         .        .224. 

Diversity  of  style  between  these  two  books,  p.  224.  Early  ex 
ternal  attestation  of  Apocalypse,  pp.  224,  225  ;  Millennarian 
use  of  it,  p.  226 ;  tended  to  discredit  the  book,  ib. ;  ascrip 
tion  of  it  to  Cerinthus,  p.  227  ;  whether  Caius  was  responsible 
for  this  ascription,  ib.  Recovery  of  new  fragments  of  Caius, 
p.  228.  The  Alogi,  p.  229.  Did  they  ascribe  the  Gospel  to 
Cerinthus,  p.  230.  Dionysius  of  Alexandria,  pp.  230,  231. 
His  arguments  against  the  Johannine  authorship  of  Apocalypse, 
pp.  232,  233;  examination  of  them, rpp.  234 — 242.  Its  coinci 
dences  of  diction  with  the  Gospel,  pp.  235,  236  ;  its  points  of 
difference,  pp.  237,  238.  Solecisms  of  the  Apocalypse,  pp. 
238—241.  The  Greek  of  the  Gospel,  p.  241 ;  its  superiority 
over  that  of  the  Apocalypse  accounted  for,  pp.  241,  242. 


XVI  CONTENTS. 


LECTURE   XIV. 

THE  JOHANNINE  BOOKS.   PART  III. 

Page 
THE  DATE  OF  THE  APOCALYPSE          ....     243 

Earlier  date  assigned  by  the  sceptical  school,  p.  243.  Theory 
of  Renan  and  his  followers,  pp.  243 — 246.  Nero  the  'Beast,' 
p.  245  ;  its  '  Number,'  p.  246.  This  theory  imputes  failure  to  the 
predictions  of  the  book,  p.  247  ;  is  incredible,  pp.  247,  248  ; 
attempts  to  deny  that  failure  is  imputed,  pp.  249,  250.  Ancient 
conception  of  Prophecy,  p.  250.  Modern  solutions  of  the 
riddles  of  the  book  are  but  partial,  pp.  251,  252  ;  multiplicity 
of  solutions,  p.  253.  Other  objections  to  the  Neronian  solu 
tion,  p.  254.  Neronian  date  not  improbable,  p.  255.  Vischer's 
theory  that  the  book  is  composite,  pp.  255 — 262.  Sabatier's 
modification  of  Vischer's  theory,  p.  259.  The  chapters  said  to 
be  purely  Jewish  bear  marks  of  Christian  authorship,  p.  260. 
The  date  assigned  by  Vischer  and  Sabatier  to  the  publication 
of  the  book  cannot  be  reconciled  with  their  interpretation  of  it, 
p.  262. 


LECTURE   XV. 

THE  JOHANNINE  BOOKS.      PART  IV. 
THE  FOURTH  GOSPEL  AND  THE  QUARTODECIMANS       .     262 

TheQuartodecimans  alleged  as  witnesses  against  Fourth  Gospel, 
p.  262.  Real  difficulty  in  its  account  of  Last  Supper,  pp.  263 — 
265  ;  solutions  offered,  p.  264  ;  a  forger  would  have  avoided 
raising  this  difficulty,  p.  265.  Controversy  concerning  Easter, 
p.  266  ;  Baur's  assumption  as  to  the  Eastern  commemoration, 
p.  267.  First  recorded  instance  of  Paschal  disputes,  Polycarp 
and  Anicetus,  p.  268.  Probable  usage  of  the  Apostles,  p.  269. 
Second  recorded  Paschal  dispute,  Melito'  s  book,  p.  2  7  r .  Third 
recorded  Paschal  dispute, Victor  and  Polycrates,  p.  272.  Quarto- 
deciman  testimony  to  Fourth  Gospel,  ib.  The  authority  of  the 
Fourth  Gospel  not  affected  by  controversies  as  to  the  day  of  the 
Passion,  273. 

NOTES  ON  THE  ASTRONOMICAL  ASPECT  OF  THE  QUES 
TION  .        .        ....        .        ,        .     273 

Jewish  New  Moon,  p.  273.  Table  of  New  Moons,  p.  274. 
Point  of  difference  between  Wieseler  and  Caspari,  ib. 


CONTENTS.  XV11 

LECTURE  XVI. 

THE  JOHANNINE  BOOKS.      PART  V. 

Page 

THE  GOSPEL  AND  THE  MINOR  EPISTLES     .        .  :      .275 

The  fourth  Evangelist  was  (i)  a  Jew,  pp.  275 — 277  ;  was  (ii)  a 
Jew  of  Palestine,  pp.  278 — 280;  was  (iii)  of  the  first  century, 
pp.  280 — 283  ;  was  (iv)  an  eye-witness  of  the  events  he  relates, 
pp.  284 — 286  ;  and  a  disciple  of  the  Baptist,  p.  285  ;  was  John 
the  Apostle,  p.  287.  Theory  of  another  John,  '  the  Elder,' 
pp.  287 — 289  ;  this  theory  fails  to  solve  the  questions  of  author 
ship  of  the  Johannine  Books,  p.  289  ;  the  Minor  Epistles, 
p.  290 — 295  ;  their  authenticity  questioned,  p.  290;  established 
conclusively  by  internal  evidence,  pp.  291  ;  they  confirm  the 
Johannine  authorship  of  the  Gospel,  p.  292.  The  Third 
Epistle,  St.  John  and  Episcopacy,  pp.  293.  '  The  Elect 
Lady '  of  the  Second  Epistle,  p.  294.  Attempts  to  allegorize 
away  parts  of  the  Fourth  Gospel,  p.  295.  Importance  of  the 
facts  implied  in  the  Third  Epistle,  ib. 

LECTURE  XVII. 

THE  JOHANNINE  BOOKS.      PART  VI. 
THE  FOURTH  GOSPEL  AND  THE  SYNOPTICS     s   .        .     296 

Omissions  of  the  Fourth  Gospel,  p.  296 ;  instance  as  regards  our 
Lord's  birthplace,  p.  297  ;  absurdity  of  Renan's  view  of  this 
case,  pp.  298,  299  ;  St.  John's  manner  is  to  assume  previous 
knowledge  in  his  readers,  p.  300;  his  'Irony,'  pp.  301 — 303  ; 
his  knowledge  of  previous  Gospels,  pp.  304,  305  ;  his  last 
chapter,  p.  304  ;  he  wrote  after  Peter's  death,  p.  305  ;  supple 
mental  character  of  his  Gospel,  p.  306  ;  his  silence  as  to  the 
Eucharist,  ib. ;  the  institution  of  the  Eucharist  by  our  Lord 
involves  a  claim  of  Divinity  on  His  part,  p.  307 ;  Synoptic 
account  of  institution  confirmed  by  St.  Paul,  p.  308  ;  early 
Christian  belief  concerning  it,  ib.  ;  the  Eucharist  implied  in 
fourth  Gospel,  p.  309;  as  also  baptism,  p.  310;  and  the  As 
cension,  p.  311.  The  Fourth  Gospel  written  with  a  purpose, 
ib.  ;  its  coincidences  with  the  Synoptics,  p.  312  ;  it  contains 
facts  omitted  by  them,  p.  314;  a  priori  probability  of  our 
Lord's  earlier  visits  to  Jerusalem  recorded  in  it,  ib. ;  traces  in 
the  Synoptics  of  the  Juclsean  ministry,  316. 
b 


XV111  CONTENTS. 


LECTURE   XVIII. 

Page 

THE  ACTS  OF  THE  APOSTLES     ,.  .     .  .     317 

Date  of  this  book  a  vital  matter,  p.  317.  External  attestation 
of  it,  pp.  317 — 319.  Internal  evidence,  p.  320.  Modern  theories 
of  its  compilation,  p.  321.  The  'we'  sections,  pp.  321 — 327; 
the  author  of  these,  p.  322.  Tradition  of  Luke's  authorship  of 
Third  Gospel  and  Acts,  p.  323.  Imagined  marks  of  spurious- 
ness,  p.  324.  Unity  of  authorship  of  Acts  inferred  from  its 
structure  and  contents,  p.  325  ;  and  from  its  diction,  p.  326. 
Literary  skill  of  the  author,  p.  327.  Motives  for  denying  its 
unity,  pp.  328 — 335.  Its  supernatural  element,  p.  329.  Its 
representation  of  Paul's  relations  with  the  Twelve,  pp.  330 — 
335.  The  Tubingen  version  of  Paul's  History,  p.  331  ;  its  in 
credibility  as  compared  with  the  account  in  Acts,  p.  332. 
Absence  of  Pauline  topics  from  speeches  ascribed  to  him  in 
this  book,  p.  334.  Supposed  artificial  parallelism  between  its 
narratives  of  Peter  and  of  Paul,  p.  335.  Frequent  occurrence  of 
parallel  events  in  history ;  the  supposed  parallel  wants  its 
climax,  p.  336.  Abrupt  close  of  the  Acts,  p.  337.  The 
author's  principle  of  selection  of  topics,  p.  338 ;  his  opportu 
nities  of  gaining  information,  p.  339,  340  ;  his  account  of  Philip 
the  Deacon,  ib.  ;  he  possibly  used  as  materials  a  diary  of  his 
own,  p.  341.  His  reports  of  Paul's  speeches,  pp.  342 — 347. 
His  slight  use  of  Paul's  Epistles,  p.  344 ;  for  example,  that 
to  Philippians,  p.  345  ;  Galatians,  345  ;  i  and  2  Corinthians, 
p.  346.  Reports  of  Peter's  speeches  in  Acts  compared  with 
his  First  Epistle,  p.  347.  External  confirmations  of  the 
author's  accuracy,  pp.  347 — 349.  Holtzmann's  theory  that 
the  author  followed  Josephus,  p.  350.  Discrepancies  between 
the  Acts  and  Josephus,  p.  351. 


LECTURE   XIX. 

APOCRYPHAL  ACTS  OF  THE  APOSTLES  .        .         .352 

No  other  Acts  but  Luke's  admitted  into  the  Canon,  p.  353. 
Apocryphal  Acts  mostly  of  heretical  origin,  pp.  353,  354  ;  after 
wards  expurgated  for  orthodox  use,  p.  354.  (i)  The  Abgar 
Legend,  pp.  354 — 357  ;  extant  form  of  it,  p.  356.  (ii)  The  Acts 
of  Paul  and  Thecla,  pp.  357—362  ;  Tertullian's  account  of  its 
origin,  p.  357  ;  tinged  with  Encratism,  p.  358  ;  its  story,  pp. 
358 — 360;  still  extant,  361  ;  time  and  place  of  composition,  pp. 
361,  362.  Excesses  in  the  direction  of  Encratism  easily  con- 


CONTENTS.  Xix 

Page 

doned  by  the  orthodox,  362.  (iii)  The  Acts  of  St.  Thomas,  pp. 
363 — 372  ;  Leucian  Acts,  p.  363  ;  light  thrown  by  the  Acts  of 
Thomas  on  Gnostic  ideas,  p.  364 ;  narrative  of  this  book,  pp. 
365 — 370 ;  Ritual  described  in  it,  pp.  367 — 369  ;  its  doctrine, 
p.  371  ;  date  and  place  of  composition,  pp.  371 — 372.  (iv)  The 
Acts  of  St.  Peter,  the  Clementines,  pp.  372-374  ;  the  '  Circuits 
of  Peter,'  and '  Preaching  of  Peter,'  p.  373;  the  Simon-Paul 
theory,  pp.  373,  374;  'Acts  of  Peter  and  Paul,'  p.  375  ;  Feast 
of  29th  June,  pp.  376,  377  ;  rival  traditions  concerning  Peter, 

P-  378-  (v)  Tne  4cts  °f  Sf-  Jonn->  PP-  378 — 384  5  heretical 
character  of  the  Leucian  Acts,  pp.  379,  380  ;  second-century 
traditions  concerning  John,  pp.  381 — 383;  later  legends,  p. 
383  ;  Assumption  of  the  B.  V.  M.,  pp.  384 — 386. 


LECTURE   XX. 
THE  PAULINE  EPISTLES 387 

The  Sceptical  school  not  agreed  which  of  these  to  reject,  pp. 
387,  388.  Four  groups  of  them,  p.  389.  A  collection  of 
Pauline  Letters  early  made,  p.  390 ;  this  probably  set  the 
example  of  making  other  collections  of  letters,  p.  391.  Pro 
bable  time  and  place  of  collection  of  Pauline  Letters,  p.  392. 
St.  Paul  used  by  Justin  Martyr,  ib.  Methodius  and  Justin,  p. 
393.  FIRST  GROUP,  pp.  395 — 403  ;  i  Thgssalonians,  pp.  395 — 
398.  2  Thessalonians,  pp.  398 — 402  ;  its  prophecy  of  the  Man 
of  Sin,  pp.  399 — 401  ;  external  attestation  of  both  Epistles,  p. 
401  ;  precaution  against  forgery,  ib.  ;  lost  Epistles,  p.  402. 
SECOND  GROUP,  pp.  403 — 415  ;  note  of  early  date  stamped  on 
these  Epistles  by  the  character  of  their  contents,  p.  403  ;  short 
duration  of  the  struggle  to  impose  circumcision  on  Gentile  con 
verts,  ib. ;  necessarily  early  date  of  Letters  written  while  this 
struggle  was  going  on,  p.  404.  Similar  inference  from  the  fact 
that  at  the  time  they  were  written  Paul's  Apostolic  authority 
was  disputed,  ib.  The  Epistle  to  the  Galatians,  p.  405  ;  abstract 
of  its  argument,  p.  406.  Comparison  with  Romans,  pp.  407, 
408  ;  point  of  difference  between  the  two  Epistles,  p.  409.  The 
Epistles  to  the  Corinthians,  pp.  409,  410.  Ambiguity  of  name 
Galatian,  pp. 410 — 413.  No  need  to  suppose  that  the  ficklenessof 
the  Galatians  must  be  accounted  for  by  their  Celtic  origin,  p.  413 ; 
concluding  chapter  of  Romans,  pp.  413,  414.  THIRD  GROUP, 
pp.  415 — 428;  Philippians,^.  415,  416;  Philemon,  p.  416 ; 
Colossians,  pp.  416 — 423  ;  external  attestation,  p.  416  ;  internal 
evidence,  pp.  417,  418 ;  objections  grounded  on  its  diction,  pp. 
418,  419  ;  on  its  Christology,  p.  420  ;  on  its  reference  to  Gnostic 
teaching,  pp.  420 — 423  ;  Ephesians,  pp.  423 — 433  ;  external 


XX  CONTENTS. 

Page 

evidence,  pp.  423,  424;  its  affinities  with  I  Peter,  p.  424;  its 
close  likeness  to  Colossians,  p.  425 ;  Paley's  account  of  this 
fact,  ib. ;  rejected  by  sceptical  critics,  ib. ;  question  of  priority 
between  the  two,  p.  426;  Holtzmann's  theory,  p.  427;  this 
Epistle  contradicts  modern  theories  of  early  Church  history,  p. 
428 ;  the  Epistle  was  written  when  the  admission  of  Gentiles 
was  recent,  p.  430  ;  ruling  topics  of  these  two  Epistles  distinct, 
p.  431 ;  literary  excellence  and  influence  of  Ephesians,  p.  432. 
FOURTH  GROUP,  pp.  433—452  ;  Pastoral  Epistles  rejected,  yet 
used  by  Renan,  p.  433  ;  external  attestation,  pp.  433 — 435  ; 
rejection  by  early  heretics,  p.  435  ;  objections  founded  on — (i) 
their  diction,  p.  436  ;  on  (2)  the  controversies  they  deal  with,  pp. 
436,  437 ;  on  (3)  the  difficulty  of  harmonizing  them  with  the 
Acts,  pp.  437,  438  ;  their  diction  probably  marks  them  as  St. 
Paul's  latest  work,  pp.  438,  439  ;  their  historical  contents  sug 
gest  like  conclusion,  p.  440 ;  they  imply  Paul's  release  from 
the  imprisonment  recorded  in  Acts,  pp.  440 — 444  ;  independent 
evidence  of  this  release,  pp.  442,  443  ;  objections  to  late  date, 
pp.  444,  445  ;  internal  evidence  for  2  Timothy,  pp.  446 — 452  ; 
its  Pauline  character,  pp.  446 — 448  ;  its  details,  pp.  448,  449  ; 
its  genuineness  carries  with  it  that  of  I  Timothy  and  Titus,  pp. 
451,  452  ;  Kenan's  estimate  of  all  three,  p.  452. 


LECTURE   XXI. 

THE  EPISTLE  TO  THE  HEBREWS          .        .        .        -453 

Question  of  authorship,  not  of  authenticity  of  Hebrews,  p.  453. 
Use  of  it  by  Clement  of  Rome,  pp.  453,  454.  Accepted  by 
whole  Eastern  Church  as  St.  Paul's,  pp.  454,  455.  Testi 
mony  of  Clement  of  Alexandria,  pp.  454,  455.  View  of  Origen, 
pp.  455,  456.  Western  opinion  adverse,  pp.  456,  457.  Ter- 
tullian  ascribed  it  to  Barnabas,  pp.  457,  458.  Reaction  under 
Jerome  and  Augustine,  p.  458.  Evidence  of  MSS.  and  Ver 
sions,  p.  459.  Its  canonicity  well  established,  ib.  Its  anony- 
mousness,  p.  460.  Internal  evidence  for  and  against  Pauline 
authorship,  pp.  460 — 465  ;  individual  passages,  pp.  460 — 462 ; 
its  doctrine  Pauline,  p.  462  ;  it  uses  Pauline  language  and 
mannerisms,  pp.  462,  463  ;  its  O.  T.  citations,  p.  463  ;  its 
Alexandrian  colouring,  p.  464 ;  its  general  style  un-Pauline, 
pp.  464,  465.  Conjectures  as  to  authorship,  pp.  465,  466  ;  con 
siderations  in  favour  of  ascription  to  Barnabas,  pp.  466 — 468. 
Probably  addressed  to  Jewish  Christians  of  Jerusalem,  pp. 
468 — 471.  "Written  from  Italy,  p.  471.  Lower  limit  of  date, 
p.  472  ;  upper  limit  doubtful,  pp.  472,  473.  Note  on  the  Codex 
Claromontanus,  p.  473. 


CONTENTS.  XXI 


LECTURE   XXII. 

Page 
THE  FIRST  EPISTLE  OF  ST.  PETER      .        .        .        .475 

Eusebius's  classification  of  N.  T.  Books,  pp.  475,  476.  Ex 
ternal  attestations  of  /  Peter,  pp.  477,  478  ;  it  is  included  in  all 
Canons  except  the  Muratorian,  p.  478.  Internal  difficulties 
alleged  against  it,  pp.  479,  480.  "Written  while  Christians 
were  liable  to  be  punished  as  such,  p.  480.  It  contradicts  Baur's 
views  of  early  Church  history,  pp.  480,  481.  Its  Paulinism  of 
doctrine,  p.  481.  Place  of  composition,  'Babylon,'  pp.  481 — 
484.  Roman  martyrdom  of  Peter,  p.  484.  Addressed  to  Chris 
tians  dispersed  in  Pontus,  &c.,  p.  485.  Its  coincidences  with 
Romans,  pp.  485,  486  ;  with  Ephesians,  pp.  486 — 489.  Seufert's 
theory,  p.  488.  Its  coincidences  with  Epistle  of  James,  p.  489. 
Its  originality  and  individuality,  pp.  490,  491. 


LECTURE   XXIII. 
THE  EPISTLE  OF  ST.  JAMES 492 

This  Epistle  classed  by  Eusebius  among  '  Antilegomena,' p. 
492.  The  '  Seven  Catholic  Epistles,'  ib. ;  evidence  of  Origen 
concerning  it,  p.  493  ;  of  Clement  of  Alexandria,  pp.  493,  494  ; 
of  Hermas,  pp.  494,  495  ;  probably  of  Clement  of  Rome,  p. 
495  ;  of  Irenseus,  p.  496  ;  other  authorities,  ib.  Internal  evi 
dence,  pp.  497 — 501.  James,  'The  Lord's  Brother,'  first 
Bishop  of  Jerusalem,  p.  497  ;  probability  of  the  usual  ascrip 
tion  of  the  Epistle  to  him,  pp.  497,  498.  Written  for  Christian 
Jews,  p.  498  ;  probably  residents  in  Syria,  p.  499.  The  author 
a  personal  follower  of  our  Lord,  pp.  500,  501  ;  wrote  before  fall 
of  Jerusalem,  pp.  501,  502  ;  his  picture  of  the  Jews  confirmed 
by  Josephus,  p.  502.  Other  internal  evidences  of  early  date, 
pp.  503,  504  ;  its  doctrine  not  anti-Pauline,  pp.  505 — 506  ;  its 
silence  as  to  disputes  of  Paul's  time,  p.  506  ;  late  date  assigned 
to  it  by  sceptical  school,  p.  507.  Purity  of  its  Greek,  508;  its 
verbal  coincidences  with  Romans,  pp.  509,  510.  Its  substan 
tial  agreement  with  Paul's  doctrine,  ib.  ;  its  teaching  closely 
akin  to  O.  T.  Prophets,  p.  510  ;  but  not  merely  Judaic,  pp. 
511,  512.  Character  of  the  author  as  shown  in  it,  p.  513; 
its  moral  precepts,  ib. ;  moral  effects  of  Christian  teaching, 
PP-  5  Hi  5r5-  This  Epistle  why  placed  first  of  the  Catholic 
Epistles,  p.  515. 


XX11  CONTENTS. 


LECTURE   XXIV. 

Page 

THE  EPISTLE  OF  ST.  JUDE  ...        .        .516 

Historical  attestation  of  the  books  of  N.  T.  unequal,  p.  516; 
a  few  of  them  were  doubted  by  critics  in  fourth  century,  p.  518. 
Cause  of  the,  scantiness  of  attestation  of  Epistles  of  James  and 
Jude,  pp.  518,  519;  of  the  two,  Jude's  has  better  external 
attestation,  p.  519  ;  especially  in  the  West,  p.  520.  Jude,  one 
of  'the  Lord's  brethren,'  p.  521;  tradition  concerning  his 
grandsons  preserved  by  Hegesippus,  ib.  •  doubt  whether  he 
was  of  the  Twelve,  p.  522  ;  what  we  are  to  understand  by 
'Brethren  of  our  Lord,'  pp.  522,  523.  Date  of  the  Epistle,  p. 
523  ;  against  whom  were  its  censures  directed  ?  pp.  524,  525. 
Its  use  of  Jewish  Apocrypha,  pp.  525 — 528;  the  'Assumption 
of  Moses,'  pp.  525,  526;  the  'Book  of  Enoch,'  pp.  527,  528. 
The  Syriac  translation  of  the  Catholic  Epistles,  p.  528. 


LECTURE   XXV. 

THE  SECOND  EPISTLE  OF  ST.  PETER  .        .        .529 

Doubts  in  the  Church  of  the  authority  of  this  Epistle,  pp.  529, 
530.  Early  opinion  unfavourable  to  it  and  other  of  the  '  Catho 
lic'  Epistles,  pp.  530,  531.  General  acceptance  attained  by 
them  all,  p.  531.  Question  reopened  at  the  Reformation,  ib. 
Opinion  of  Epiphanius  favourable,  p.  532  ;  inconsistency  of 
Jerome,  ib.  ;  and  of  Didymus,  ib.  Evidence  of  MSS.  and 
Canons,  p.  533.  Opinion  of  Origen,  ib. ;  of  Firmilian,  p.  534. 
Old  Latin  Version,  ib.  Doubtful  use  of  this  Epistle  by  Clement 
of  Alexandria,  ib. ;  by  Irenseus,  pp.  535,  536 ;  its  use  by 
pseudo-Clement,  536;  by  Theophilus  of  Antioch,  p.  537.  Pre 
diction  in  this  Epistle  of  the  destruction  of  the  world  by  fire, 
PP-  537>  538-  This  destruction^early  became  a  point  of  Chris 
tian  belief,  p.  537.  Use  of  2  Peter  in  so-called  Second  Epistle 
of  Clement,  p.  538.  Doubtful  use  of  2  Peter  by  Hernias  and 
Clement  of  Rome,  ib..  Its  acceptance  far  short  of  that  of 
/  Peter,  ib.  Grotius's  theory,  539.  The  author  claims  to  be 
Peter,  ib. ;  if  not  Peter,  is  a  forger,  p.  540 ;  this  alternative 
must  be  faced,  541.  Relation  between  2  Peter  and  Jude,  pp. 
542,  543.  Difference  of  style  between  /  and  2  Peter,  pp.  543, 
544;  points  of  resemblance  between  them,  pp.  544,  545. 
Coincidences  of  2  Peter  with  Petrine  speeches  in  Acts,  p.  545. 


CONTENTS.  XX111 

Page 

Dr.  Edwin  Abbott's  attack  on  2  Peter,  pp.  545—558.  Its  un- 
worthiness  of  style,  pp.  545 — 547-  'Baboo'  Greek,  p.  545. 
Defects  in  its  Greek  are  natural,  if  it  was  written  by  a  Palesti 
nian  Jew,  p.  546  ;  but  cannot  affect  the  question  of  its  genuine 
ness,  pp.  546,  547.  Its  faults  of  style  not  discovered  by  the 
Greek  Fathers,  546.  Its  alleged  borrowings  from  Josephus, 
ppm  547 — 558.  Difficulties  in  accepting  the  Petrine  authorship, 
p.  547.  Archdeacon  Farrar's  opinion,  pp.  548,  549.  Alleged 
coincidences  with  Josephus  merely  verbal,  p.  549.  Not 
within  brief  compass,  p.  550 ;  nor  in  same  sequence,  ib.  ;  nor 
do  they  occur  in  the  case  of  unusual  words,  p.  551.  No  N.  T. 
writer  keeps  within  the  limits  of  Biblical  language,  ib.  The 
Greek  of  Philo,  pp.  552 — 555.  Discussion  of  the  words  and 
combinations  relied  on  by  Dr.  Abbott,  pp.  554,  555.  Coinci 
dences  with  Philo's  writings  found  in  /  Peter,  p.  557;  also 
elsewhere  in  N.  T.,  ib.  Result  of  examination  of  Dr.  Abbott's 
criticism,  p.  558.  Newly-discovered  Stichometry,  p.  559. 


LECTURE  XXVI. 
NON-CANONICAL  BOOKS 560 

The  Apocalypse  of  Peter,  pp.  560 — 564.  Recognized1  in  the 
Muratorian  Fragment,  p.  560  ;  quotations  from  it  by  Clement 
of  Alexandria,  ib.  ;  and  by  Macarius,  p.  561.  Its  use  not  quite 
extinct  in  the  fifth  century,  p.  562.  Whether  included  in  the 
Sinaitic  MS.,  p.  563  ;  the  Psalms  of  Solomon,  ib.  Conjectural 
ascription  of  passages  to  this  Apocalypse,  p.  564 ;  other 
Apocalypses,  ib.  The  Epistle  of  Barnabas,  pp.  565 — 572. 
External  attestation,  pp.  565,  566.  Impossibility  of  accepting 
some  of  the  contents  as  inspired,  pp.  566,  567.  Whether  it 
would  be  possible  to  acknowledge  its  Apostolic  origin  and 
deny  its  inspiration,  p.  568  ;  attitude  of  the  writer  towards 
Judaism,  p.  569;  date  of  the  Epistle,  570;  to  what  Church 
addressed,  p.  571.  The  Epistle  to  Clement,  pp.  572 — 579. 
Written  in  the  name  of  the  Church  of  Rome,  p.  572.  Import 
ance  of  the  Bishop  of  Rome  merged  in  the  importance  of  his 
Church,  ib.  Proofs  of  the  early  use  of  the  Epistle,  p.  573  ;  date 
of  the  letter,  p.  574  ;  varying  accounts  of  the  order  of  the  first 
Roman  bishops,  p.  575.  No  good  reason  for  doubting  that 
Clement  was  really  at  the  head  of  the  Roman  Church,  ib. 
Whether  the  Church  of  Corinth  was  in  his  time  governed  by  a 
single  person,  p.  576;  extreme  amount  of  disorder  in  Corinth, 
ib.  The  prayer  of  Manasses,  ib.  Bearing  of  Clement's  letter  on 


XXIV  CONTENTS. 

the  question  of  Roman  supremacy,    p.  577  ;  Clement  a  Jew, 
ib. ;  authorities  for  the  text  of  Clement,  p.  578.     The  Second 
Epistle  of  Clement,  ib.   The  Shepherd  of  Hermas,  pp.  579— 593- 
External  testimony,  pp.  579,  580.     Disuse  of  non-Canonical 
writings  after  rise  of  Montanism,  p.  579.     Tertullian  and  the 
Shepherd,  p.  580.    Contents  of  the  Shepherd,  p.  581.   The  date 
of  Hermas,  p.  582.     The  book  written  in  good  faith,  pp.  583, 
584 ;  and  accepted   as  a  record  of  real  revelations,  p.  586  ; 
written  in  the  Episcopate  of  Clement,  p.  587.     Rejection  of 
Muratoriaii  account,  p.  589.     Lightfoot's  hypothesis  that  the 
original  of  this  fragment  was  in  verse,  p.  590.     Church  organi 
zation  in  the  time  of  Hermas,  p.  591.     Prophets  in  the  early 
Church,  p.  592.     Hermas  belonged  to  this  order,  ib. ;  whether 
he  was  a  Jew,  p.  594.     Hermas  and   Theodotion,  pp.  594 — 
608.    The  '  Thegri'  of  Hermas  explained  by  Mr.  Rendel  Harris 
from  Dan.  vi.  22,  p.  594.     Dr.  Hort's  further  inference,   ib. 
Preliminary  consideration  unfavourable  to  his  inference,  p.  595. 
Greek  translations  of  the  Old  Testament,  pp.  595 — 599.   Theo- 
dotion's  version  of  Daniel  used  in  the  Christian  Church,  pp. 
596,   597-      Epiphanius's   account  of  Greek  translations  not 
trustworthy,  p.  598.     Theodotion's  version  in  use  before  the 
time  of  Irenseus,  p.  599.     The  version  used  by  Hippolytus, 
Clement,  Justin  Martyr,  and  Tertullian,  respectively,  p.  600.  'A 
silent  rejection  of  the  Septuagint  not  probable,  p.  602.  Reasons 
for  believing  that  there  had  been  a  previous  version,  p.  603. 
Characteristics  of  the  Chisian  Daniel,  ib. ;  its  affinities  with  the 
Apocryphal  Esdras,  ib.     Did  the  New  Testament  writers  make 
use  of  the  Chisian  version  ?  p.  604.     Neither  Clement  of  Rome 
nor  Baruch  recognize  it,  p.  607.     The  Teaching  of  the  Twelve 
Apostles,  pp.  609—625.      External  testimony,  p.  609.     The 
'Church  Ordinances,'  p.  610.  Barnabas  and  the  '  Two  Ways,'  p. 
6 1 1 .    The  Western  form  of  the  « Two  Ways,'  ib.    Krawutzcky's 
theory,  p.  612.     Bryennius's  'Teaching  of  the  Apostles,'  ib. ; 
its   account   of  Church  organization,   p.  613.      Whether   the 
author  was  an  Ebionite,  p.  615.     Relations  of  the  Didache  to 
Barnabas  and  Hermas,  p.  616.     Dr.  Taylor  on  the  Didache, 
ib.      Hypothesis    that    the    Didache    is   founded    on   a    pre- 
Christian  manual  for  the  instruction  of  proselytes,  p.  617.    Re 
lations  of  the  Didache  to  Barnabas,  p.  618 ;  and  to  Hermas, 
p.    619 ;    Western   form    of    the    book,    ib.      Whether    the 
Didache  in  its  present  form  had  early  circulation  in  the   East, 
p.  621 ;   how  much  of  it  may  be  referred  to  a  pre-Christian 
model,   p.  622  ;  its  instructions  about  baptism,  ib. ;  on  prayer, 
p.  623  ;  on  the  Eucharist,  ib. ;   the  last  chapter,  p.  624;  whether 
known  to  Origen,  ib. 


INTRODUCTORY. 


PART    I . 

PRINCIPLES    OF   THE    INVESTIGATION. 

THE  subject  appointed  for  our  Lectures  this  Term  is  The 
Bible ;  but  that  opens  up  a  field  so  wide,  that  to  treat 
adequately  of  all  that  it  is  desirable  should  be  known  about 
it  would  give  us  employment,  not  for  one  Term,  but  for 
several  years.  Last  year  you  attended  Lectures  on  Natural 
Religion  and  on  Christian  Evidences.  I  assume  that  you  then 
went  through  the  proofs  that  there  is  a  God  ;  that  there  is 
no  impossibility  in  His  revealing  His  will  to  His  creatures, 
using  miracle  or  prophecy  as  credentials  to  authenticate  His 
message  ;  and  that  you  went  through  the  proofs  of  our  Lord's 
divine  mission,  establishing  the  conclusion  that  He  was  the 
bearer  to  the  world  of  a  revelation  from  God.  Then,  in 
logical  order,  follows  the  question,  How  is  that  revelation  to 
be  known  to  us  ?  what  are  the  books  that  record  it  ? — in  other 
words  :  What  is  the  Canon  of  Scripture  ? 

In  this  investigation  the  determination  of  the  New  Testa 
ment  Canon  comes  before  that  of  the  Old.  We  must  first 
determine  what  the  books  are  which  contain  authentic  records 
of  the  teaching  of  our  Lord  and  His  Apostles ;  because  we 
can  then  use  their  testimony  to  the  older  books,  which  they 
reverenced  as  divinely  inspired.  Next  after  the  question  of 
the  Canon  comes  that  of  Biblical  Criticism.  Supposing  it  to 
be  established  that  certain  books  were  written,  containing  an 
authoritative  record  of  Divine  revelations,  we  have  still  to 

B 


2  INTRODUCTORY.  [l. 

inquire  whether  those  books  have  come  down  safely  to  us — 
how  we  are  to  remove  all  the  errors  which  may  have  accumu 
lated  during  the  process  of  transcription  in  many  centuries, 
and  so  restore  the  texts  to  their  original  purity.  Perhaps 
here  might  follow  questions  concerning  the  Translation  of 
these  texts,  for  without  translation  books  written  in  Hebrew 
and  Greek  cannot  be  made  available  for  the  instruction  of 
our  people.  At  any  rate,  we  have  to  consider  questions  con 
cerning  the  Interpretation  of  these  books.  May  we  follow 
the  same  rules  as  we  do  in  interpreting  any  ordinary  book, 
and  be  satisfied  in  each  case  with  that  plain  meaning  which 
it  seems  the  writer  intended  ;  or  does  the  fact  that  the  books 
are  divine — that  the  real  author  is  ngLman,  but  God  ;  that 
there  may,  therefore,  often  be  a  meaning  unknown  even  to 
the  human  agent  who  was  commissioned  to  write  the  words 
— oblige  us  to  employ  special  methods  of  interpretation  in 
order  to  discover  the  deeper  spiritual  meaning  ?  And,  lastly, 
we  must  inquire  what  is  involved  in  the  Divine  Inspiration  we 
ascribe  to  these  books.  Does  it  exclude  the  supposition  of  the 
smallest  inaccuracy  being  found  in  them  in  science,  history, 
moral  or  religious  teaching  ?  If  we  admit  the  possibility  of 
any  such  inaccuracy,  can  we  put  any  limits  to  our  concession  ? 

The  subjects  I  have  named — the  Canon,  the  Criticism, 
the  Interpretation  of  our  books,  and  the  question  of  their 
Inspiration — are  by  no  means  all  that  might  be  discussed  in 
treating  of  the  Bible  ;  yet  these  alone  form  a  programme  to 
which  it  is  impossible  to  do  justice  in  the  time  at  my 
disposal,  and  in  practice  I  have  found  that,  with  whatever 
subject  I  begin,  I  am  obliged,  if  I  wish  to  treat  it  at  all 
adequately,  to  crowd  out  nearly  all  the  rest.  At  present  I  am 
about  to  take  up  the  subject  which  seems  in  logical  order  the 
first — the  question  what  books  contain  the  authentic  record 
of  the  teaching  of  our  Lord  and  His  Apostles — in  other 
words,  the  question  of  the  New  Testament  Canon. 

I  wish  to  keep  the  question  I  have  named  quite  clear  of 
any  discussion  as  to  the  Inspiration  of  the  sacred  books,  such 
discussion  plainly  belonging  to  a  later  stage  of  the  investi 
gation.  I  wish  to  examine  into  the  evidence  for  the  genuine 
ness  and  authenticity  of  the  books  of  the  Bible  in  the  same 


I.]  PRINCIPLES    OF    THE    INVESTIGATION.  3 

way  as  in  the  case  of  any  ordinary  books.  It  is  clearly  one 
question  :  At  what  date  and  by  what  authors  were  certain 
books  written  ?  And  quite  another  question  :  Is  there  reason 
to  believe  that  the  authors  of  these  books  were  aided  by 
supernatural  guidance,  and  if  so,  what  was  the  nature  and 
extent  of  that  supernatural  assistance  ?  The  former  is,  as  we 
shall  presently  see,  a  question  of  vital  importance  in  the 
controversy  between  Christians  and  unbelievers  ;  the  latter  is 
one  internal  among  Christians,  and  only  admits  of  discussion 
among  those  who  are  already  convinced  of  the  historic 
credibility  of  the  New  Testament  books,  and  who,  because 
they  believe  what  these  books  relate  about  Jesus  of  Nazareth, 
find  no  difficulty  in  believing  also  that  He  endowed  with 
special  powers  those  whom  He  commissioned  to  write  the 
revelation  which  He  brought  into  the  world. 

I  make  these  remarks  at  the  outset,  because  it  enables  us 
at  once  to  set  aside  certain  topics  as  irrelevant  to  the  present 
investigation.  Suppose,  for  example,  it  be  alleged  that 
there  are  plain  contradictions  between  the  first  Gospel  and 
the  fourth ;  if  we  were  engaged  in  an  inquiry  as  to  the 
Inspiration  of  the  Gospels,  it  would  be  of  the  utmost  im 
portance  to  examine  whether  and  how  far  this  allegation  is 
true.  But  it  may  be  quite  possible  to  set  it  aside  as  entirely 
irrelevant,  when  we  are  only  inquiring  whether  or  not  both 
Gospels  were  written  by  Apostles,  It  is  the  constant  ex 
perience  of  anyone  who  has  ever  engaged  in  historical 
investigation  to  have  to  reconcile  contradictions  between 
his  authorities ;  but  such  contradictions  must  reach  a  high 
point  in  number  and  gravity  before  they  suggest  a  suspicion 
that  the  opposing  statements  do  not  both  proceed, 'as  they 
profess  to  do,  from  persons  having  a  first-hand  knowledge 
of  the  matters  about  which  they  write. 

I  have  just  said  that  I  wish  to  investigate  the  genuineness , 
and  authenticity  of  the  books  of  the  Bible  in  the  same  way; 
as  we  should  in  the  case  of  any  uninspired  book.  But  we 
are  not  quite  permitted  to  do  so.  Those  who  would  approve 
of  interpreting  the  Bible  according  to  the  same  rules  by  which 
we  should  interpret  any  other  book  apply  very  different  rules 
in  determining  the  authorship  of  its  parts  from  what  are  used 

B  2 


4  INTRODUCTORY.  [l. 

in  the  case  of  other  books.  If  we  were  to  apply  to  the  re 
mains  of  classical  literature  the  same  rigour  of  scrutiny  that 
is  used  towards  the  New  Testament,  there  are  but  few  of 
them  that  could  stand  the  test.  There  are  many  of  you  who 
count  as  good  classical  scholars,  who  have  always  received 
with  simple  faith  that  what  you  read  in  your  printed  books 
is  the  work  of  the  author  to  whom  it  is  commonly  ascribed, 
and  have  never  applied  your  minds  to  consider  what  answer 
you  could  give  to  anyone  who  should  deny  it.  You  are  very 
familiar,  for  instance,  with  Horace.  Do  you  know  what 
interval  separates  the  oldest  manuscript  of  his  works  from 
the  age  of  Augustus,  in  which  the  poet  is  said  to  have  lived  ? 
Can  you  fill  up  the  gap  by  quotations  from  ancient  authors  ? 
Do  you  know  what  ancient  authors  mention  him  or  quote 
his  poems  ?  Can  you  tell  how  far  the  earliest  quotation  is 
separated  in  time  from  the  poet  himself?  Can  you  tell 
what  extent  of  his  writings  is  covered  by  quotations  ?  Can 
you  give  separate  proofs  for  each  book  of  the  Odes,  of  the 
Satires  and  Epistles,  and  for  the  Art  of  Poetry  ?  And  if  you 
are  able  to  give  a  proof  for  every  book,  can  you  meet  the 
requirements  of  a  more  severe  critic,  who  might  demand  a 
distinct  proof  of  the  Horatian  origin  of  every  ode  of  every 
book  ?  I  suppose  the  chances  are  that  you  would  not  at 
tempt  to  answer  these  questions  ;  because,  though  you  pro 
bably  have  heard  of  the  theory  of  the  Jesuit  Hardouin,  that 
the  Odes  of  Horace  and  other  classical  books  were  written 
by  Benedictine  monks  in  the  dark  ages,  it  is  not  likely  that 
| you  have  given  that  theory  a  serious  thought.  Yet,  if  we 
)  were  called  on  to  refute  it,  by  producing  quotations  from  the 
Odes  by  any  writer  who  lived  within  two  centuries  of  the 
poet's  death  (and  later  testimony  than  that  would  not  be 
thought  worth  looking  at  in  the  case  of  a  New  Testament 
book),  we  should  be  able  to  make  only  a  very  unsatisfactory 
reply.  One  example  is  often  cited  to  show  how  little  this 
kind  of  investigation  is  in  practice  judged  to  be  necessary. 
The  Roman  History  of  Velleius  Paterculus  has  come  down 
to  us  in  a  single  very  corrupt  manuscript,  and  the  book  is 
only  once  quoted  by  Priscian,  a  grammarian  of  the  sixth 
century ;  yet  no  one  entertains  the  smallest  doubt  of  its 


I.J  PRINCIPLES   OF   THE    INVESTIGATION.  5 

genuineness.*  The  first  six  books  of  the  Annals  of  Tacitus 
are  also  known  to  us  only  through  a  single  manuscript  which 
came  to  light  in  the  fifteenth  century.  Not  long  ago  an 
elaborate  attempt  was  made  to  show  that  all  the  books  of  the 
Annals  were  forged  in  that  century  by  an  Italian  scholar, 
Poggio.  And  it  was  asserted  that  'no  clear  and  definite! 
allusion  to  the  Annals  can  be  found  until  the  first  half  of  the 
fifteenth  century.'  The  latest  editor  of  the  Annals,  Mr. 
Furneaux,  is  what,  if  the  subject  of  his  labours  were  a  New 
Testament  book,  would  be  called  an  'apologist':  that  is  to 
say,  he  believes  that  the  traditional  doctrine  as  to  the 
authorship  is  true,  and  that  the  supposed  discovery  of 
forgery  is  a  mare's  nest ;  yet,  in  answer  to  the  assertion  just 
quoted,  he  can  only  produce  one  allusion,  by  no  means 
'  clear  and  definite,'  and  that  of  a  date  300  years  later  than 
the  historian.  Thus  you  see  that  if  the  external  testimony 
to  the  New  Testament  books,  which  I  shall  discuss  in  future 
lectures,  had  not  been  forthcoming,  we  might  still  have 
good  reason  for  holding  fast  to  the  traditional  theory  of  their 
authorship.  But  where  external  proof  is  most  abundant  in 
the  case  of  profane  authors,  it  falls  considerably  short  of 
what  can  be  produced  in  support  of  the  chief  books  of  the 
New  Testament. 

The  reason,  however,  why  a  more  stringent  test  is  applied  i 
to  our  books  is  on  account  of  their  contents,  namely,  because 
the  books  contain  accounts  of  miracles  and  what  purport  to 
be  prophecies.     Now,  at  first  sight,  it  appears  unreasonable 
to  allow  this  consideration  to  enter  when  we  are  discussing 
the  authorship  of  books.     The  works  of  Livy  contain  ac 
counts  of  prodigies  which  I  may  perhaps  think  Livy  credu 
lous  for  believing,  yet  I   am    not   on   that  account  in   the' 
slightest  degree  inclined  to  doubt  that  Livy  was  the  author  f 
of  the  history  which  bears  his  name.     Still  more  does  the 
remark  apply  to  the  accounts  of  miracles  which  swarm  in  the 
writings  of  the  monkish  historians.    I  disbelieve  the  miracles, 
but  I  make  no  question  that  the  histories  which  relate  those 


*  This  case  is  discussed  in  the  controversy  between  Boyle  and  Bentley 
about  the  Epistles  of  Phalaris. 


6  INTRODUCTORY.  [l. 

miracles  were  written  by  the  authors  to  whom  they  are 
ascribed.  But  here  is  the  pinch  of  the  matter.  These 
miraculous  tales  to  which  I  refer  relate  for  the  most  part 
to  events  which  the  narrators  represent  as  having  occurred 
a  long  time  before  their  own  date.  When  honest  and  in 
telligent  men  relate  things  of  which  they  have  personal 
knowledge,  as  a  general  rule  we  do  not  find  them  telling 
of  anything  miraculous.  In  short,  it  is  only  throwing  into 
other  words  the  statement  that  a  miracle  is  an  exceptionjo 
the  ordinary  course  of  nature,  to  say  that  an  account  of  a 
miracle  is  not  likely  to  occur  in  true  hisjpry,  and  therefore 
that,  if  we  meet  with  such  an  account,  it  is  likely  to  proceed 
from  persons  not  truthful  or  not  well  informed.  So  it  is  a 
canon  of  criticism  that  stories  embellished  with  miraculous 
ornaments  are  distant  in  time  from  the  age  in  which  the 
scene  is  laid.  Troy  may  have  been  really  taken  ;  Achilles 
and  Agamemnon  may  have  been  real  persons ;  but  when  we 
read  in  the  Iliad  of  gods  and  goddesses  taking  part  in  the 
battles  round  the  city,  this  in  itself  is  reason  enough  to  suspect 
that  Homer  lived  at  such  a  distance  from  the  events  which  he 
relates  as  permitted  him  to  imagine  the  men  of  former  days 
to  be  very  different  from  *  such  as  mortals  now  are,'  so  that 
things  might  have  happened  to  them  unparalleled  in  his  own 
experience.  On  these  principles,  then,  it  is  contended  that  our 
sacred  books,  from  the  mere  fact  of  their  containing  stories  of 
miracles,  are  shown  not  to  be  the  work  of  contemporaries. 

If  there  is  one  narrative  of  the  New  Testament  which  more 
than  another  contains  internal  proof  of  having  been  related 
by  an  eye-witness,  it  is  the  account  of  the  voyage  and  ship 
wreck  of  St.  Paul.  I  recommend  to  your  attention  the  very 
'interesting  monograph  of  Mr.  Smith,  of  Jordan  Hill,  who 
himself  sailed  over  the  entire  course,  and  by  a  multitude 
of  minute  coincidences  verified  the  accuracy  of  St.  Luke's 
narrative.  Yet,  because  the  story  tells  of  miracles  performed 
in  the  island  on  which  Paul  was  cast,  it  has  been  supposed, 
without  the  smallest  reason  of  any  other  kind,  that  these 
things  must  have  been  added  by  a  later  hand.* 

*  Davidson,  for  instance,  says  ('  Introduction  to  the  New  Testament/ 
II.  134)  :  'The  description  of  the  voyage  and  shipwreck  of  Paul  on  his 


I.]  PRINCIPLES    OF   THE   INVESTIGATION.  7 

The  same  things  may  be  said  as  to  the  prophecies  which 
our  sacred  books  contain.  In  judging  of  an  ordinary  book 
there  is  no  more  certain  canon  of  criticism  than  that  the 
book  is  later  than  the  latest  person  named  in  it,  or  the  last 
event  described  in  it.  If  we  read  a  book  which  contained 
mention  of  the  Duke  of  Wellington  and  Sir  Robert  Peel  and 
of  the  battle  of  Waterloo,  it  would  take  an  amazing  amount 
of  evidence  to  convince  us  that  the  book  was  written  in  the 
reign  of  Queen  Anne.  It  is  by  taking  notice  of  anachronisms 
of  this  kind  that  the  spuriousness  has  been  proved  of  works 
which  had  imposed  on  an  uncritical  age  ;  as,  for  example, 
the  '  Epistles  of  Phalaris,'  which  were  exposed  in  Bentley's'i 
famous  essay,  or  the  Decretal  Epistles,  purporting  to  be-' 
written  by  the  early  Bishops  of  Rome,  on  which  so  much  of./ 
the  fabric  of  Roman  supremacy  has  been  built.  Well,  the 
same  principles  of  criticism  have  been  freely  applied  to  our 
sacred  books.  Porphyry  contended  that  the  prophecy  of 
Daniel  must  have  been  written  by  some  one  who  lived  later 
than  Antiochus  Epiphanes,  who  is  clearly  described  in  the 
book  :  the  latter  half  of  Isaiah,  it  is  urged,  must  be  later  than 
Cyrus  :  the  Gospel  of  St.  Luke  must  be  later  than  the  Destruc 
tion  of  Jerusalem,  which  it  describes  as  to  be  '  trodden  down 
of  the  Gentiles  until  the  times  of  the  Gentiles  be  fulfilled,' 
showing,  it  is  said,  that  the  writer  not  only  lived  after  the 
siege,  but  so  long  after  as  to  have  known  that  Jerusalem 
remained  for  a  considerable  time  in  a  condition  of  abiding 
desolation. 

Now,  I  have  intimated  in  what  I  have  said  that  I  am 
ready,  within  reasonable  limits,  to  adopt  the  canons  of  criti 
cism  to  which  I  have  referred.  But  I  cannot  admit  them  to 
be  applicable  without  exception.  Miraculous  embellishments 

way  to  Rome  is  minute  and  accurate,  proceeding  from  an  eye-witness,  in 
A  few  notices  here  and  there  betray  a  later  hand,  especially  those  which  llj 
are  framed  to  show  the  wonder-working  power  of  the  Apostle,  such  as  ||| 
xxviii.  3-5,  8,  9.' 

Dr.  S.  Davidson,  for  some  time  Professor  in  the  Lancashire  Indepen-  •., 
dent  College,  published  an  Introduction  to  the  New  Testament,  in  three  I/I 
volumes,  1848-51.  In  this  the  main  lines  of  traditional  opinion  were  III 
followed  ;  but  his  views  show  a  complete  alteration  in  the  new  Introduc-  II 
tion,  in  two  volumes,  which  he  published  in  1868.  My  quotation  is  from"' 
the  second  edition  of  the  later  book,  published  in  1882. 


8  INTRODUCTORY.  [l. 

may  be  a  ground  for  suspecting  that  the  narrative  is  not  con 
temporaneous  with  the  events  ;  but  if  it  is  asserted  that  mira 
culous  stones  are  never  told  by  men  contemporary  with  the 
things  related,  that  certainly  is  not  true.  I  have,  at  different 
times,  read  in  periodicals  accounts  of  spiritual  manifestations 
which  I  entirely  disbelieve,  yet  in  many  cases  impute  to  the 
narrators  no  wilful  intention  to  deceive,  nor  do  I  doubt  that 
they  were,  as  they  profess,  actually  present  at  the  scenes  they 
describe.  The  Life  of  St.  Martin  of  Tours,  by  his  friend  Sul- 
Apicius  Severus,  is  full  of  the  supernatural.  I  do  not  find  that 
any  of  those  who  refuse  to  believe  in  the  miraculous  stories 
attempt  to  justify  their  disbelief  by  maintaining  that  Sul- 
picius  was  not  the  author  of  the  Life.  These  are  instances 
of  what  I  reckon  as  false  miracles  ;  but  the  course  of  lectures 
of  last  year  must  have  been  a  failure  if  they  did  not  establish 
that  true  miracles,  though  from  the  nature  of  the  case_not_of 
common  occurrence,  are  still  possible.  If  so,  when  they 
actually  do  occur,  the  witnesses  of  them  may  relate  them  in 
true  histories.  In  short,  if  miracle  and  prophecy  be  impos 
sible,  there  is  an  end  of  the  whole  matter.  Your  faith  is  vain, 
and  our  teaching  is  vain. 

Now,  this  principle,  namely,  the  absolute  impossibility  of 
miracle,  is  the  basis  of  the  investigations  of  the  school,  some 
of  whose  results  must  be  examined  in  this  course  of  lectures, 
j  Two  of  its  leading  writers,  Strauss  and  Renan,  in  their  pre 
faces,  make  the  absolute  rejection  of  the  supernatural  the 
foundation  of  their  whole  structure.  Renan*  (p.  Hi.)  declares 
that  he  will  accept  a  miracle  as  proved  only  if  it  is  found  that 
it  will  succeed  on  repetition,  forgetting  that  in  this  case  it 
would  not  be  a  miracle  at  all,  but  a  newly-discovered  natural 


*The  first  edition  of  the  'Vie  de  Jesus  par  Ernest  Renan'  was  published 
in  1863.  It  was  followed  by  six  successive  volumes,  relating  the  history 
of  the  '  Origines  du  Christianisme  '  :  that  is  to  say,  the  formation  and  early 
history  of  the  Christian  Church.  The  last  volume,  bringing  the  history 
down  to  the  reign  of  Marcus  Aurelius,  was  published  in  1882.  The  refe 
rences  in  these  lectures  are  usually  to  an  1863  edition  of  the  'Life  of 
Jesus,'  which  alone  was  available  when  they  were  written.  It  has  not  been 
necessary  for  my  purpose  to  examine  minutely  the  modifications  introduced 
into  later  editions,  because  the  changes  in  Kenan's  views  are  sufficiently 
indicated  in  the  later  volumes  of  his  series. 


I.]  PRINCIPLES   OF   THE    INVESTIGATION.  9 

law.  Strauss,*  equally,  in  his  preface  (p.  xv)  declares  it  to  be 
his  fundamental  principle  that  there  was  nothing  supernatural 
in  the  person  or  work  of  Jesus.  The  same  thing  may  be  said 
about  a  book  which  made  some  sensation  on  its  publication  a 
few  years  ago,  '  Supernatural  Religion.'!  The  extreme  cap- 
tiousness  of  its  criticism  found  no  approval  from  respectable 
foreign  reviewers,  however  little  they  might  be  entitled  to  be 
classed  as  believers  in  Revelation.  Dates  were  assigned  in 
it  to  some  of  our  New  Testament  books  so  late  as  to  shock 

*  D.  F.  Strauss  (1808-1874),  a  pupil  of  Baur,  published,  in  1835,  his 
*  Life  of  Jesus,'  the  mythical  theory  propounded  in  which  gave  rise  to  much 
controversy,  and  stimulated  other  attempts  to  disprove  the  historic  credi 
bility  of  the  Gospel  narratives.  The  book  had  rather  fallen  into  oblivion 
when,  in  1864,  Strauss,  availing  himself  of  the  labours  of  those  who  had 
written  in  the  interval,  published  a  new  '  Life  of  Jesus,'  *  for  the  German, 
people.'  It  is  to  this  popular  Life  that  I  refer  in  the  text.  In  1872, 
Strauss  broke  completely  with  Christianity,  in  a  book  called  '  The  Old 
Faith  and  the  New.' 

t  This  book,  published,  vols.  i.  and  ii.  in  1874,  vo1-  m- in  I^77»  obtained 
a  good  deal  of  notoriety  by  dint  of  enormous  puffing,  great  pains  having 
been  taken  to  produce  a  belief  that  Bishop  Thirlwall  was  the  author.  The 
aspect  of  the  pages,  bristling  with  learned  references,  strengthened  the 
impression  that  the  author  must  be  a  scholar  of  immense  reading.  The 
windbag  collapsed  when  Lightfoot  showed  that  this  supposed  Bishop 
Thirlwall  did  not  possess  even  a  schoolboy  acquaintance  with  Greek  and 
Latin,  and  that  his  references  were  in  some  cases  borrowed  wholesale,  in 
others  did  not  prove  the  things  for  which  they  were  cited,  and  very  often 
appealed  to  writers  whose  opinion  is  of  no  value.  But  what  I  wish  here 
to  remark  is,  that  what  really  made  the  book  worthless  was  not  its  want  of 
scholarship,  but  its  want  of  candour.  An  indifferent  scholar,  if  he  were 
industrious  and  honest,  and,  I  must  add,  modest  enough  not  to  find  fault 
with  the  translations  of  better  scholars  than  himself,  might  compile  a  book 
which  would  only  need  the  removal  of  some  surface  errors  to  be  a  really  valu 
able  contribution  to  knowledge.  But  want  of  candour  vitiates  abook  through 
and  through.  There  is  no  profit  in  examining  the  conclusions  arrived  at 
by  a  writer  who  never  seems  to  care  on  which  side  lies  the  balance  of  his 
toric  probability,  but  only  which  conclusion  will  be  most  disagreeable  to 
the  assertors  of  the  supernatural.  For  myself,  I  find  instruction  in  studying 
the  results  arrived  at  by  an  inquirer  who  strives  to  be  candid,  whether  he 
be  orthodox  or  not ;  but  I  have  little  curiosity  to  find  out  the  exact  amount 
of  evidence  which  would  leave  a  captious  objector  without  a  word  to  say 
in  justification  of  his  refusal  to  admit  it. 

Lightfoot' s  answers  to  '  Supeniatural  Religion'  appeared  in  the  Con 
temporary  Review,  December,  1874  '•>  January,  February,  May,  August, 
October,  1875  ;  February  and  August,  1876  ;  May,  1877.  In  addition  to 
their  temporary  object  of  refutation,  these  articles  contain  so  much  of  per 
manent  value  on  the  criticism  of  the  remains  of  the  second  century,  that 
the  announcement  is  welcome  that  they  are  at  length  to  be  republished. 

'  Supernatural  Religion '  has  also  been  dealt  with  by  Westcott  in  a 
Preface  to  the  later  editions  of  his  '  New  Testament  Canon.' 


10 


INTRODUCTORY. 


[l. 


(sen* 


^ 

V 


/*& 


ft' 


anyone  who  makes  an  attempt  fairly  to  judge  of  evidence. 
And  the  reason  is,  that  the  author  starts  with  the  denial  of 
the  supernatural  as  his  fixed  principle.  If  that  principle  be, 
in  his  eyes,  once  threatened,  all  ordinary  laws  of  probability 
must  give  way.  It  is  necessary  at  the  outset  to  call  your 
attention  to  this  fundamental  principle  of  our  opponents, 
because  it  explains  their  seeming  want  of  candour  ;  why  it  is 
that  they  are  so  unreasonably  rigorous  in  their  demands  of 
proof  of  the  authenticity  of  our  books  ;  why  they  meet  with 
evasions  proofs  that  seem  to  be  demonstrative.  It  is  because, 
to  their  minds,  any  solution  of  a  difficulty  is  more  probable 
than  one  which  would  concede  that  a  miracle  had  really 
occurred. 

Now,  it  has  become  more  and  more  plain  that,  if  it  be 
granted  that  our  Gospels  were  written  by  the  persons  to  whom 
they  are  ascribed,  two  of  whom  were  Apostles,  men  who  had 
personal  knowledge  of  the  things  which  they  relate,  and 
whose  whole  narrative  bears  the  impress  of  honesty,  then  the 
reality  of  miracles  necessarily  follows.  No  one  has  proved 
/fc  this  more  clearly  than  Strauss.  He  has  conclusively  shown 
that  anyone  who  has  determined  to  begin  by  asserting  the 
absolute  impossibility  of  miracle  cannot  come  with  a  per- 
fectly  unbiassed  mind  to  investigate  the  history  of  our  sacred 
books,  because  an  acceptance  of  the  traditional  account  of 
their  origin  would  be  absolutely  fatal  to  this  first  principle. 
Strauss  begins  his  latest  work  on  the  life  of  Jesus  by  criticiz 
ing  the  works  of  his  predecessors,  who  were  as  disinclined  as 
himself  to  admit  the  reality  of  miracles,  and  who  yet  accepted 
the  traditional  account  of  the  authorship  of  the  Gospels  ;  and 
he  shows  that  every  one  of  them  failed,  and  could  not  help 
failing,  to  maintain  this  inconsistent  position.  Paulus*  may 
serve  as  a  specimen  of  writers  of  this  class.  He  receives  the 
Gospel  narratives  as  in  some  sense  true  ;  the  Evangelists  do 
not  intend  to  deceive  ;  they  tell  things  that  really  occurred, 
but  through  an  error  of  judgment  they  represent  incidents  as 
miraculous  which  -in  truth  are  capable  of  a  natural  explana- 

*  Paulus  (1761-1851),  Professor,  first  at  Jena,  afterwards  at  Heidelberg, 
published  his  '  Commentary  on  the  New  Testament,'  1800-1804,  and  his 
'  Life  of  Jesus'  in  1828. 


I.]  PRINCIPLES    OF   THE    INVESTIGATION.  I  r 

tion.  For  example,  according  to  him,  there  was  nothing 
miraculous  in  Christ's  feeding  of  the  multitude.  But  the 
example  of  Christ  and  His  Apostles  freely  distributing  their 
scanty  store  among  the  people  shamed  all  the  rest  into  pro 
ducing  and  sharing  with  their  neighbours  what  they  had 
secretly  brought  each  for  himself;  and  so  all  were  filled,  and 
supposed  there  had  been  something  supernatural  in  the  mul 
tiplication  of  the  food.  Similarly,  Paulus  does  not  deny  that 
our  Lord  seemed  to  walk  on  the  water ;  but,  since  of  course 
He  could  not  really  have  done  so,  he  concludes  that  He 
walked  on  the  bank  of  the  lake,  where,  through  an  optical 
delusion,  his  movements  conveyed  a  false  impression  to  the 
spectators.  He  so  far  believes  the  story  of  the  announce 
ment  by  an  angel  of  the  Saviour's  Incarnation  as  to  concede 
that  the  Virgin  Mary  truly  told  that  a  stranger  had  come  in 
to  her  with  this  message,  who  represented  himself  to  be  the 
angel  Gabriel ;  but  since  this  could  not  possibly  be  true,  we 
must  conclude  that  the  messenger  was  an  impostor.  These 
few  specimens  are  enough  to  give  you  an  idea  of  the  mass  of 
improbabilities  and  absurdities  which  are  accumulated  in  the 
working  out  of  this  scheme,  so  that  we  may  fairly  say  that 
the  history,  as  Paulus  tells  it,  is  a  more  miraculous  one  than 
if  we  take  the  Gospel  narratives  in  their  literal  sense.  It  is 
unnecessary  for  me  to  waste  words  in  exposing  these  absurdi 
ties,  because  no  one  has  a  more  lively  sense  than  Strauss 
himself  of  the  failure  of  the  attempts  of  his  predecessors  to 
write  a  non-miraculous  life  of  Jesus ;  and  he  owns  distinctly 
that,  if  the  historical  character  of  the  Gospels  be  ever  con 
ceded,  it  will  be  impossible  to  eliminate  miracle  from  the  life 
of  Christ.* 

Strauss's  own  solution,  you  no   doubt  know,  was  to  deny 
that  the  Gospels  are  historical.     According  to  him,  they  arejj 
not  written  by  eye-witnesses  of  the  things  related,  but  are| 
legends  put  together  at  a  considerable  interval  of  time  after'' 
the  supposed   events.      How  Jesus   of  Nazareth  succeeded 
in  collecting  a  number  of  disciples,  and  in  inspiring  them 


*  '  Sind  die  Evangelien  wirklich  geschichtliche  Urkunden,  so  1st  das 
Wunder  aus  der  Lebensgeschichte  Jesu  nicht  zu  entfernen.' — Leben  Jesu+ 
p.  17. 


1  2 


INTRODUCTORY.  [l. 

with  a  persuasion,  not  to  be  shaken  by  the  unhappy  end  of 
his  life,   that  he  was  the  promised  Messiah,    Strauss  very 
imperfectly  explains.     But  his  theory  is,  that  a  community 
of  Jewish  Christians   arose   who  somehow  or  another  had 
come  to  believe  that  Jesus  was  the  Messiah,  and  who  had 
all  from  childhood  been  brought  up  in  the  belief  that  the 
Messiah  was  to  have  certain  distinguishing  marks,  that  he 
was  to  be  born  in  Bethlehem,  and  soforth  ;  that  then  stories 
circulated  among  them  purporting  to  show  how  Jesus  actually 
did  all  that  according  to  their  notions  he  ought  to  have  done  ; 
and  that  these  stories,  being  in  perfect  accordance  with  their 
preconceived  notions,  when  once  started  were  readily  believed, 
and  in  simple  faith  passed  on  from  one  to  another,  until  in 
process  of  time  they  came  to  be  recorded  in  the  Gospels.     It 
is  not  the  business  of  this  Term  to  expose  the  weakness  of 
this  theory  ;    and,   indeed,   Strauss  himself  appears  to  have 
become  sensible  what  a  difficult  task  he  had  set  himself  when 
he  undertook  to  deny  the  truth  of  the  Gospel  histories,  and 
yet  clear  the  historians  of  conscious  imposture.     Certainly, 
there  is  a  very  perceptible  shifting  of  ground  from  his  original 
work,  published  in  1835,  in  the  new  popular  version  brought 
out  for  the  use  of  the  German  people  in  the  year  1864.     But 
common  to  both  is  the  principle  of  the  absolute  rejection  of 
the  supernatural  ;  and  this  I  single  out  because  the  investiga 
tion  in  which  I  wish  to  engage  you  proceeds  on  an  opposite 
plan,  and  therefore  will  naturally  lead  to  a  different  result. 
My  investigation  aims  at  being  purely  historical.     It  refuses 
to  be  dominated  by  any  philosophical  or  pseudo-philosophical 
principle.    I  wish  to  examine  the  evidence  for  the  date  of  the 
Christian  books  on  the  same  principles  on  which  I  would  act 
if  they  were   ordinary   profane   histories,   without   allowing 
myself  to  be  prejudiced  for  or  against  them  by  a  knowledge 
of  their  contents,  or  by  fear  of  consequences  which  I  shall 
be  forced  to  admit  if  I  own  these  works  to  be  genuine.     For 
I^P  not  hold  our  present  experience  to  be  the  absolute  rule 
and  measure  of  all  possibilities  future  and  past  ;    nor  do  I 
deem  it  so  incredible  that   God  should  reveal  Himself  to 
His  creatures,  as  to  refuse  to  listen  to  all  evidence  for  such 
a  fact  when  it  is  offered. 


II.]         BAUR'S    THEORY   OF    EARLY   CHURCH    HISTORY.  I  J 


II. 

PART     II. 

BAUR'S    THEORY   OF    EARLY    CHURCH    HISTORY. 

In  his  new  Life  of  Jesus,  Strauss  has  greatly  availed  himself 
of  the  labours  of  Baur*  and  of  the  school  founded  by  him, 
called  sometimes,  from  his  place  of  residence,  the  Tubingen 
school,  or,  from  the  nature  of  their  theories,  the  Tendency 
school.  It  will  be  advisable  to  give  you,  by  way  of  preface 
to  our  course,  some  short  account  of  these  theories  :  not  only 
because  of  the  wide  acceptance  they  have  met  with  from 
writers  of  the  sceptical  school  both  in  Germany  and  of  later 
years  in  England,  but  also  because  the  view  which  they 
present  of  the  history  of  the  early  Church  affects  the  credit 
to  be  given  to  the  testimony  of  that  Church  concerning  our 
sacred  literature.  There  is  no  use  in  calling  a  witness  without 
making  an  attempt  to  remove  prejudices  which  you  know  to 
be  entertained,  whether  against  his  honesty  or  his  means  of 
information.  Therefore,  before  producing  to  you  evidence 
as  to  the  reception  of  the  Gospels  by  the  early  Church,  it  is 
expedient  to  inquire  whether  certain  speculations  are  de 
serving  of  regard,  which  represent  that  Church  as  having 
altered  so  much  and  so  rapidly  from  its  original  form,  as  to 
be  put  under  a  strong  temptation  to  falsify  the  documents 
which  relate  its  early  history.  According  to  Baur,  our  booksMj 
are  not  the  innocent,  purposeless  collection  of  legendary  tales/I 
for  which  the  disciples  of  Strauss  might  take  them ;  all,  even! 
those  which  seem  least  artful,  are  put  together  with  a  pur-)/ 
pose,  and  have  a  '  tendency'  Just  as  of  Mr.  Dickens's  novels, 
one  is  intended  to  expose  the  abuses  of  the  Poor  Law  system, 


*  F.  C.  Baur  (1792-1860)  published  in  the  Tubingen  '  Zeitschrift'  for 
1831,  a  paper  on  the  Christ-party  in  the  Church  of  Corinth,  which  con 
tained  the  germs  of  the  theory  of  which  an  account  is  given  in  the  text. 
The  fully  developed  theory  was  given  in  his  'Paulus,'  published  in  1845. 


14  INTRODUCTORY.  [ll. 

another  of  the  Court  of  Chancery,  another  of  Ecclesiastical 
Courts,  and  so  forth;  so  each  of  the  Christian  books,  how 
ever  innocently  it  may  seem  to  profess  to  give  straightforward 
narrative,  is  really  written  with  a  secret  design  to  inculcate 
certain  dogmatic  views. 

But  what  are  these  dogmatic  views  ?     To  answer  this  we 
must    expound  the  history  which   Baur    gives    of  the    early 
progress  of  Christianity.     He  manufactured  it  mainly  out  of 
his  own  notions  of  the  fitness  of  things,  with  very  slender 
support  from  external  authority ;   and  it  has  obliged  him  to 
condemn  as  forged  or  interpolated  the  great  mass  of  exist 
ing  ancient  documents,  since  they  are  so  perverse  as  not  to 
be  reconcilable  with  the  critic's  theory.     The  main  pillar  of 
the  theory  is  a  work  of  by  no  means  great  antiquity  as  com 
pared  with  the  others   which  are  to  be  discussed    in   this 
course  of  lectures,  being  not  older  than  the  very  end  of  the 
second  century.     I  speak  of  the  spurious  literature  attributed 
to  Clement  of  Rome,  a  favourite  character  with  the  manufac 
turers  of  apocryphal  literature  in  the  second  or  third  century. 
The  history  of  these  writings  is  so  remarkable,  that  I  cannot 
employ  a  few  minutes  better  than  in  giving  you  some  account 
of  them.      The  work  originated  among   the   Ebionites,   or 
Jewish-Christian    heretical    sects.       In    its   earliest    form    it 
contained  discourses  ascribed  to  the  Apostle  Peter,  both  in 
controversy  with  heathen,  and  also  with  heretics,  of  whom 
Simon  Magus  was  made  the  representative  and  spokesman. 
This  work  underwent  a  great  variety  of  recastings.     It  is 
doubtful    whether    Clement  was    introduced   into   the   very 
earliest  form  of  it ;  but  he  was  certainly,  at  a  comparatively 
early  date,  made  the  narrator  of  the  story ;  and  the  account 
of  Clement's  history  gradually  grew  into  a  little   romance, 
which,  no  doubt,  greatly  helped  the  popularity  of  the  work. 
Clement  tells  how  he  had  been  brought  up  as  a  rich  orphan  at 
Rome,  his  parents  having  been  lost  in  his  early  childhood. 
He  gives  an  affecting  account  of  his  search  for  religious  truth, 
which  he  seeks  in  vain  among  the  schools  of  the  philosophers, 
but  there  finds  nothing  but  strife  and  uncertainty.     At  last 
news  is  brought  to  Rome  of  the  appearance  of  a  wonder 
working  prophet  in  Palestine.      Clement  sails  in  search  of 


II.]         BAUR'S    THEORY    OF   EARLY   CHURCH    HISTORY.  15 

him,  arrives  after  the  death  of  Jesus,  but  meets  Peter,  and 
is  instructed  and  converted  by  him.  Travelling  about  with 
Peter,  he  finds  first  his  mother,  then  his  brothers,  then  his 
father ;  and  it  is  from  these  successive  recognitions  that  the 
work  called  the  '  Clementine  Recognitions '  takes  its  name. 
This  is  one  of  two  forms  in  which  the  work  is  still  extant ; 
the  other,  called  the  '  Clementine  Homilies,'  being  as  respects 
the  story  substantially  the  same,  but  as  respects  the  dis 
courses  worked  into  it,  and  the  doctrine  contained  in  them, 
a  good  deal  different.  The  '  Homilies  '  contain  the  Ebionite 
doctrine  in  its  strongest  form ;  in  the  '  Recognitions '  the 
repulsive  features  of  Ebionitism  are  softened  down,  so  as  to 
make  the  book  not  altogether  unfit  for  use  among  the  ortho 
dox,  and  in  fact  the  '  Recognitions  '  are  only  preserved  in  a 
Latin  translation  made  for  the  use  of  the  orthodox  by  a 
Church  writer,  Rufinus.  There  is  good  evidence  that  another 
form,  still  more  orthodox,  which  has  not  come  down  to  us, 
was  once  in  circulation.  And  though  the  heretical  character 
of  these  Clementine  writings  was  well  known  to  the  Fathers, 
who  therefore  rejected  their  doctrine,  yet  many  of  the  things 
these  writings  tell  about  Peter  passed  into  Church  tradition. 
In  particular,  this  Clementine  literature  has  had  a  marvellous 
share  in  shaping  the  history  of  Christendom,  by  inventing  the 
story  that  Peter  was  Bishop  of  Rome,  and  that  he  named 
Clement  to  succeed  him  in  that  See. 

At  the  revival  of  learning  these  writings  were  at  first 
treated  with  contumely  as  a  good-for-nothing  heretical  fig 
ment.  Long  time  passed  before  it  was  noted  that,  though 
the  book  be  regarded  as  no  more  than  a  controversial  novel, 
yet,  dating  as  it  does  from  the  end  of  the  second  century,  it 
must  be  a  most  valuable  source  of  information  as  to  the  history 
and  opinions  of  the  sect  from  which  it  emanated.  Baur,  in 
particular,  has  called  special  attention  to  the  anti-Paulinism 
of  the  work ;  and  it  is  quite  true  that  when  we  look  into  it 
carefully,  we  find  that  Paul  and  his  labours  are  passed  ove 
in  silence,  Peter  figuring  as  the  Apostle  of  the  Gentiles  a 
well  as  of  the  Jews.  In  one  passage  in  the  '  Homilies '  the 
dislike  of  Paul  passes  the  bounds  of  mere  silence.  For  Simon 
Magus  is  described  as  '  withstanding  Peter  to  the  face,'  and 


16  INTRODUCTORY.  [ll. 

declaring  that  he  was  '  to  be  blamed.'*  Many  a  reader  might 
innocently  overlook  the  malice  of  these  expressions;  but  when 
attention  is  called  to  them,  we  can  hardly  deny  that  the  coin 
cidence  of  language  with  that  in  the  Epistle  to  the  Galatians 
(ii.  1 1)  leads  to  the  surmise  that  under  the  character  of  Simon 
a  reference  to  Paul  is  cloaked  ;  and  that  Paul  is  intended  by 
the  enemy,  6  e'x#/oos  ai/0/ow7ros,  who  opposed  St.  Peter  and  St, 
James.  We  see  also  what  interpretation  is  to  be  put  on  a 
controversy  as  to  relative  superiority  between  Simon  Magus, 
who  claims  to  have  seen  our  Lord  in  vision,  and  Peter,  who 
had  actually  seen  Him  in  the  flesh.  It  must  be  admitted  that 
the  writer  shows  a  covert  dislike  to  Paul;  but  we  must  remark, 
at  the  same  time,  that  the  obscurity  with  which  he  veils  his 
assault  on  the  Apostle  shows  plainly  that  he  dared  make  no 
open  attack,  and  that  his  views  were,  at  that  time,  shared  by 
no  influential  party  in  the  Church. 

But  the  Tubingen  school  pounced  with  avidity  on  this 
book.  Here,  they  say,  we  have  the  key  to  the  true  history  of 
the  origin  of  Christianity.  Epiphanius  tells  us  that -the 
Ebionites  rejected  Paul's  Epistles,  and  looked  on  him  a,s__an 
apostate.  This  book,  then,  may  be  regarded  as  a  specimen  of 
the  feelings  towards  Paul  of  an  early  section  of  the  Christians. 
Baur's  idea  is,  that  in  all  this  anti-Pauline  rancour  we  have  a 
'  survival '  of  an  earlier  state  of  things,  the  memory  of  which 
had  been  lost,  owing  to  its  variance  with  the  Church's  sub 
sequent  doctrine.  At  the  beginning  of  the  third  century 
we  have,  in  one  corner  of  the  Church,  men  who  hate  Paul 
with  the  utmost  bitterness,  though,  in  deference  to  the  then 
general  opinion,  they  are  obliged  to  cloak  their  hatred  under 
disguises.  At  the  same  time  we  have,  in  another  corner  of 
the  Church,  the  Marcionites,f  who  recognize  no  Apostle  but 
Paul,  who  utterly  reject  the  Jewish  religion  and  the  Old 

*  In  order  that  the  coincidence  with  the  Epistle  to  the  Galatians  may 
be  more  easily  recognized,  I  adopt  the  language  of  the  Authorized  Version 
in  translating  (evavrios  avdeffTrjicds  /tot,5  'Kareyvuaufvov  jue  Ae'yets'  (Horn. 
xvii.  19). 

„  f  The  Chronicle  of  Edessa  names  A.D.  138  as  the  date  of  the  rise  of  the 
heresy  of  Marcion,  and  this  is  probably  as  near  the  truth  as  we  have  the 

,  means  of  going.  The  heresy  had  reached  formidable  dimensions  when 
Justin  Martyr  wrote  his  Apology. 


II.] 


BAUR  S   THEORY   OF    EARLY   CHURCH    HISTORY. 


Testament,  and  who  set  aside  all  the  earlier  Apostles  as  of 
no  authority.  What,  asks  Baur,  if  these  extreme  views  on 
both  sides  be  not,  as  had  been  supposed,  heretical  develop 
ments,  but  survivals  of  a  once  general  state  of  things  ?  Those 
who  themselves  hold  our  Lord  to  have  been  mere  man  find  it 
natural  to  believe  that  this  must  have  been  the  earliest  belief 
of  His  followers.  Consequently,  the  theory  is  that  the  whole 
Christian  Church  was  originally  Ebionite  ;  that  Paul  was  a 
heresiarch,  or  introducer  of  novel  doctrines  violently  con 
demned  by  the  great  mass  of  existing  believers,  of  whose 
feelings  towards  Paul  these  Clementine  writings  are  regarded 
as  a  fair  specimen  ;  that  the  representations  in  the  Acts  of 
the  Apostles  that  Paul  was  on  good  terms  with  the  elder 
Apostles  are  altogether  false,  and  that,  on  the  contrary,  the 
early  Church  consisted  of  two  parties,  Pauline  and  anti- 
Pauline,  bitterly  opposed  to  each  other. 

Such  is  the  general  outline  of  the  theory ;  but  speculation 
has  particularly  run  wild  on  the  assault  on  Paul  in  the  Cle 
mentines  under  the  mask  of  Simon  Magus.  Sceptical  critics 
jump  at  the  conclusion  that  Simon  Magus  was  the  nickname 
under  which  Paul  was  generally  known  ;  and  some  even  go 
so  far  as  to  maintain  that  the  account  in  Acts  viii.  is  a  covert 
libel  on  St.  Paul,  which  St.  Luke,  notwithstanding  his  Paul- 
inism,  has  been  so  stupid  as  to  perpetuate  in  his  history ; 
Simon's  offer  of  money  to  the  Apostles  representing  Paul's 
attempt  to  bribe  the  other  Apostles  into  recognition  of  his 
claims  by  the  gift  of  money  which  he  had  collected  for  the 
poor  saints  at  Jerusalem.  I  feel  ashamed  of  repeating  such 
nonsense  ;  but  it  is  necessary  that  you  should  know  the 
things  that  are  said  ;  for  you  may  meet  these  German  dreams 
retailed  as  sober  truth  by  sceptical  writers  in  this  country, 
many  of  whom  imagine  that  it  would  be  a  confession  of 
inability  to  keep  pace  with  the  progress  of  critical  science, 
if  they  ventured  to  test,  by  English  common  sense,  the  suc 
cessive  schemes  by  which  German  aspirants  after  fame  seek 
to  gain  a  reputation  for  ingenuity. 

A  more  careful  examination  of  the  Clementines  shows  that 
they  did  not  emanate  from  that  body  which  opposed  Paul 
in  his  lifetime.  There  appear,  in  fact,  to  have  been  two 

c 


18 


INTRODUCTORY. 


[II. 


distinct  kinds  of  Ebionites.  One  kind  we  may  call  Pharisaic 
Ebionites,  who  may  be  regarded  as  representing  those  who 
strove  to  combine  the  acknowledgment  of  the  Messiahship, 
though  not  the  Divinity,  of  Jesus  with  the  maintenance  of 
the  full  obligation  of  the  Mosaic  Law.  They  appear  never  to 
have  been  of  much  influence,  and  before  long  to  have  died 
out.  But  the  Ebionites  among  whom  the  Clementines  origi 
nated  represented  quite  a  different  set  of  opinions,  and  appear 
to  have  been  a  continuation  of  the  Jewish  sect  of  the  Essenes.* 
their  doctrines  was  a  fanatical  horror  of  the  rite  of 
sacrifice,  which  they  could  not  believe  to  have  been  divinely 
instituted.  The  whole  Temple  service  was  abomination  in 
their  eyes.  They  believed  that  the  true  prophet  had  ap 
peared  in  divers  incarnations,  Adam  being  the  first,  and 
Jesus  the  last.  The  story  of  the  fall  of  Adam,  of  course, 
they  rejected.  And  with  these  opinions  it  was  necessary 
for  them  to  reject  great  parts  of  the  Old  Testament.  The 
Pentateuch  alone  was  used  by  them,  and  of  this  large  parts 
were  cut  out  as  interpolated.  You  will  remember  that 
Paley,  in  his  '  Evidences,'  quotes  an  apocryphal  Gospel  as 
ascribing  to  our  Lord  the  saying,  *  Be_  ye  goocLjnoney- 
changers.'  This  they  interpreted  as  a  direction  not  to  be  de 
ceived  by  the  false  coin  which  purported  to  be  God's  Word. 
This  doctrine,  of  which  the  Clementine  '  Homilies '  are  full, 
would  be  as  repulsive  as  Paul's  own  doctrine  to  the  orthodox 
i  Jews  whom  Paul  had  to  encounter;  and  therefore,  as  I  say, 
these  Clementines  have  no  pretence  to  date  from  the  times, 
or  to  represent  the  feelings,  of  his  first  antagonists  in  the 
Christian  Church.  The  true  history  of  these  people  seems  to 
have  been  that,  after  the  destruction  of  the  Temple  at  Jeru 
salem  by  Titus,  some  of  the  Essene  communities,  who  lived 
on  the  other  side  of  Jordan,  and  who  knew  that  Jesus  had 
predicted  the  destruction  of  that  Temple  to  whose  rites  they 
always  had  been  opposed,  became  willing  to  own  Jesus  to 

*  On  these  two  kinds  of  Ebionites,  see  Lightfoot's  '  Galatians,'  p.  318. 
The  Church  History  of  the  period  is  likely  to  be  misunderstood  if  the 
identity  of  the  latter  kind  with  the  Elkesaites  is  not  perceived ;  and  if  it  is 
not  recognized,  how  little  claim  these  heretics  have  to  represent  any 
considerable  body,  even  of  Jewish  Christians;  and  how  late  their  origin 
was  by  their  own  confession. 


II.]          BAUR'S    THEORY   OF    EARLY    CHURCH    HISTORY.  19 

have  been  divinely  sent,  but  retained  a  number  of  their  own 
peculiar  opinions.  They  appear  to  have  made  a  few  converts 
among  the  Jews  dispersed  by  the  fall  of  the  capital,  but  not 
to  have  extended  themselves  very  widely  ;  and  it  is  not  till  the 
end  of  the  second  century,  or  the  beginning  of  the  third,  that 
some  of  them  made  their  way  to  Rome.  They  had  among 
them  some  men  of  literary  skill,  enough  at  least  to  produce  a 
forgery.  Among  the  documents  they  brought  to  Rome,  for 
instance,  was  one  called  the  '  Book  of  Elkesai/  which  pur 
ported  to  be  a  revelation  of  their  peculiar  doctrines,  but  for 
which,  it  is  interesting  to  remark,  no  higher  antiquity  was 
claimed  than  the  reign  of  Trajan,  a  time  when  all  the  Apostles 
were  dead.  They  accounted  for  this  late  date  by  a  theory 
that  the  ordinary  rule  of  God's  Providence  was  that  error 
should  come  first,  and  that  the  truth  which  corrected  it  should 
be  revealed  later.  An  early  book  of  theirs,  '  The  Preaching 
of  Peter,'  was  improved,  first  into  the  form  known  as  the 

*  Recognitions,'  afterwards  into  the  '  Homilies,'  and  was  made 
to  include  these  Elkesaite  revelations.     The  making  Simon 
Magus  the  representative  of  Pauline  ideas  has  all  the  marks 
of  being  an  after-thought.     There  is  not  a  trace  of  it  in  the 

*  Recognitions,'  through  the  whole  of  which,  as  well  as  in 
every  part  of  the  '  Homilies  '  but  the  one  already  referred  to, 
Simon  is  Simon  and  Paul  is  Paul.     But,  from  the  nature  of 
the  composition,  the  opinions  which  the  writer  means  to 
combat  must  be  put  into  the  mouth  of  some  of  the  characters 
in  the  story.     When  the  object  is  to  combat  the  doctrines  of 
Marcion,   Simon  is  made  the  exponent  of  these  doctrines. 
But  this  furnishes  no  justification  for  the  statement  that  there 
was  a  general  practice  of  nicknaming  Paul  as  Simon.     As  far 
as  we  can  see,  the  author  of  the  '  Recognitions '   is  quite 
ignorant  of  it. 

As  the  anti-Pauline  party  is  judged  of  by  the  Ebionites  of 
the  second  century,  so  the  school  of  Marcion  is  supposed  to 
represent  the  opposing  party.     Thus  the  Christian  society  is/i 
said  to  have  included  two  schools — a  Judaizing  school  and  a 
Gnostic  or  philosophizing  school — violently  hostile  to  each! 
other.     It   is   not   exactly   our   experience  that  theological 
schisms  heal  up  so  rapidly  and  so  completely  that  in  fifty 

C  2 


20  INTRODUCTORY.  [ll. 

years  no  trace  remains  of  them,  nor  even  memory  of  their  ex 
istence.  But  so,  we  are  told,  it  happened  in  this  case.  And 
as  in  the  process  of  time  the  bitterness  of  the  dispute  abated, 
arose  the  Catholic  Church,  in  which  both  Peter  and  Paul 
were  held  in  honour ;  and  then  were  attempts  made  to  throw 
a  veil  over  the  early  dissensions,  and  to  represent  the  first 
preachers  of  Christianity  as  at  unity  among  themselves. 

It  remains  to  test  this  whole  theory  of  the  conflict  of  Pau 
line  and  anti-Pauline  parties  in  the  early  Church  by  compari 
son  with  the  documentary  evidence  ;  and  the  result  is  that  it 
bears  the  test  very  ill,  so  much  so  that,  in  order  to  save  his 
theory  from  destruction,  Baur  has  been  obliged  to  make  a 
tolerably  clean  sweep  of  the  documents.  In  four  of  Paul's 
Epistles  some  symptoms  may  be  found  which  can  be  inter 
preted  as  exhibiting  feelings  of  jealousy  or  soreness  towards 
the  elder  Apostles.  But  there  is  nothing  of  the  kind  in  the 
other  nine.  The  genuineness  of  these,  therefore,  must  be 
denied.  The  Acts  of  the  Apostles  represent  Paul  as  on  most 
friendly  terms  with  Peter  and  James,  and  these  Apostles  as 
taking  his  side  in  the  controversy  as  to  imposing  Judaism  on 
the  Gentiles.  The  Acts,  therefore,  cannot  be  true  history. 
Not  only  the  discourses  ascribed  to  Peter  in  the  Acts,  but  the 

i  first  Epistle,  which  the  ancient  Church  unanimously  accepted 
as    Peter's,  is   thoroughly   Pauline   in  doctrine.     We  must, 

i  therefore,  disregard  ancient  testimony,  and  reject  the  Epistle. 
The  earliest  uninspired  Christian  document,  the  Epistle  of 
Clement  of  Rome,  confessedly  belongs  to  the  conciliatory 
Peter  and  Paul  being  placed  in  it  on  equal  terms  of 
reverence  and  honour.  It,  too,  must  be  discarded.  So,  in 
like  manner,  go  the  Epistles  of  Ignatius  and  Polycarp,  the 
former  of  whom  writes  to  the  Romans  (ch.  v.),  *  I  do  not 
pretend  to  command  you,  like  Peter  or  Paul.' 

Now,  it  is  very  easy  to  make  a  theory  on  any  subject  if  we 
are  at  liberty  to  sweep  away  all  facts  which  will  not  fall  in 
with  it.  By  this  method  the  Elkesaites  were  able  to  maintain 
that  the  Old  Testament  did  not  sanction  the  right  of  sacrifice, 
and  Marcion  that  the  New  Testament  did  not  recognize  the 
God  of  the  Jews.  But  one  has  a  right  to  suspect  any  theorizer 
if,  in  order  to  clear  the  ground  for  a  foundation  for  his  theory, 


II.]          BAUR'S    THEORY   OF    EARLY   CHURCH    HISTORY.  21 

he  has  to  begin  by  getting  rid  of  the  previously  accepted 
facts.  So  it  is  a  presumption  against  this  theory  of  Baur's, 
that  we  find  him  forced  to  get  rid  of  nearly  all  the  documents 
purporting  to  come  from  the  Apostolic  age,  because,  notwith 
standing  that  they  have  been  searched  with  microscopic 
minuteness  for  instances  of  Pauline  and  anti-Pauline  rancour, 
scarcely  anything  of  the  kind  can  be  found.  I  will  give  a 
specimen  or  two  of  these  supposed  instances,  which  will 
enable  you  to  appreciate  the  amazing  amount  of  misdirected 
ingenuity  which  has  been  spent  in  elaborating  this  system. 
The  first  is  a  specimen  which  is  thought  by  those  who  have  ^ 
discovered  it  to  be  an  exceedingly  good  and  striking  one. 
St.  Matthew  (vii.  22,  23),  in  the  Sermon  on  the  Mount,  makes 
our  Lord  speak  of  men  who  say,  'Lord,  Lord,'  and  who  will, 
at  the  Last  Day,  appeal  to  their  prophesying,  their  driving 
out  devils,  and  their  doing  of  miracles  in  the  name  of  Jesus, 
but  who  will  be  rejected  by  Him  as  doers  of  lawlessness 
(avofjiia),  whom  He  had  never  known.  It  may  surprise  you  to 
hear  that  this  sentence  was  coined  by  the  Jewish  Christian  ( 
author  of  the  record  as  a  protest  against  the  opposition  to  the 
Law  made  by  Paul  and  his  followers.  And  it  may  surprise 
you  more  to  hear  that  St.  Luke  is  highly  complimented 
for  the  skill  with  which  (xiii.  26)  he  turns  this  Jewish  anti- 
Pauline  saying  into  one  of  a  Pauline  anti-Jewish  character. 
He  substitutes  the  word  aSi/aa,  '  injustice,'  for  avo/ua,  '  law 
lessness,'  and  he  directs  the  saying  against  the  Jews,  who  will 
one  day  appeal  to  having  eaten  and  drunk  in  the  presence  of 
Jesus,  and  to  His  having  taught  in  their  streets,  but,  notwith 
standing,  shall  be  told  by  Him  to  depart  as  doers,  not  of 
avo/u'a,  but  of  iniquity,  and  shall  break  forth  into  loud  weeping 
when  they  see  people  coming  from  the  east  and  west,  and 
north  and  south,  and  sitting  down  with  Abraham,  Isaac,  and 
Jacob,  while  themselves  are  shut  out. 

One  other  sample  I  will  give  you.  St.  Matthew  says  (x.  27), 
'  What  I  tell  you  in  darkness,  that  speak  ye  in  light ;  and 
what  ye  hear  in  the  ear,  that  preach  ye  upon  the  housetops.' 
St.  Luke  (xii.  3) — '  Whatsoever  ye  have  spoken  in  darkness 
shall  be  heard  in  the  light ;  and  that  which  ye  have  spoken 
in  the  ear  in  closets  shall  be  proclaimed  on  the  housetops.'  ^ 


22  INTRODUCTORY.  [ll. 

It  is  contended  that,  whereas  St.  Matthew  represents  the 
Apostles  as  directed  to  speak  in  the  light  and  on  the  house 
tops,  St.  Luke  turns  the  phrase  into  the  passive  —  the  pro 
clamation  shall  be  by  other  than  the  Apostles,  namely,  by 

Paul  and  his  party. 
When,  however,  all  ingenuity  has  been  tried,  there  is  no 

^  escaping  the  acknowledgment  that,  if  we  are  to  look  for  an 
anti-Pauline  Gospel,  it  cannot  be  any  of  those  we  have  now. 
That  Matthew's  Gospel  was  made  primarily  for  the  use  of 
/Jews  most  critics  are  agreed.  Yet,  do  we  find  this  Jewish 
Gospel  hostile  to  the  admission  of  Gentiles  ?  It  opens  (ii.  i) 
with  an  account  of  Gentile  Magi  from  the  distant  East  com 
ing  to  worship  the  infant  Saviour.  In  the  first  chapter  which 
relates  any  miracle  (viii.  5),  we  have  an  account  of  one  per 
formed  at  the  request  of  a  Gentile,  who  is  commended  as 
exhibiting  faith  not  to  be  found  in  Israel  ;  and  on  this  occa 
sion  there  is  taught  the  doctrine  of  the  admission  of  the  Gen 
tiles,  not  to  equal  privileges  with  the  Jews,  but  to  a  place 

*  vacated  by  the  rejection  of  the  Jews.  *  Many  shall  come  from 
the  east  and  west,  and  shall  sit  down  with  Abraham,  and 
Isaac,  and  Jacob,  in  the  kingdom  of  heaven  ;  but  the  children 
of  the  kingdom  shall  be  cast  out  into  outer  darkness  ;  there 
shall  be  weeping  and  gnashing  of  teeth.'  It  is  to  be  noted 
that  the  Gentile  centurion  of  St.  Matthew  is  in  St.  Luke  made 
a  kind  of  Jewish  proselyte  —  '  He  loveth  our  nation,  and 
hath  built  us  our  synagogue'  (vii.  5).  In  a  later  chapter 
of  St.  Matthew  the  same  doctrine  is  taught  even  more  plainly 
—  '  The  kingdom  of  God  shall  be  taken  from  you,  and  given 
to  a  nation  bringing  forth  the  fruits  thereof  (xxi.  43).  The 

/  parting  command  of  our  Saviour  recorded  in  this  Gospel  is, 
'Go  ye  and  make  disciples  of  all  nations'  (xxviii.  19).  In 
the  account  of  our  Lord's  death,  a  critic  with  a  keen  eye  for 

t  '  tendency,'  might  pronounce  Matthew  strongly  anti-Jewish. 
It  is  Luke  (xxiii.  28),  not  Matthew,  who  records  our  Lord's 
words  of  tender  pity  —  '  Daughters  of  Jerusalem,  weep  not  for 

^  Me,  but  weep  for  yourselves,  and  for  your  children.'  St. 
Matthew  seems  anxious  to  throw  the  guilt  of  our  Lord's  death 
off  the  Gentiles,  and  on  the  Jews.  Pilate's  wife  warns  her 

<  husband  to  'have  nothing  to  do  with  that  just  man'  (xxviL 


% 


II.]          BAUR'S   THEORY   OF   EARLY   CHURCH    HISTORY.  23 

19).     Pilate  himself  washes  his  hands  before  the  multitude  / 
and  declares  that  he  is  '  innocent  of  the  blood  of  this  just 
person.'     The  Jews  accept  the  awful  burden,  and  exclaim,  / 
'His  blood  be  on  us,  and    on    our   children'  (ib.  24,    25).*' 
Nay,  we  find  in  our  St.  Matthew  a  trait  also  found  in  St.  John's 
Gospel,  on  account  of  which  the  latter  has  been  characterized^ 
as  strongly  anti-Jewish,  namely,  that  the  unconverted  mem 
bers  of  the  Jewish  nation  are  spoken  of  as  *  the  Jews,'  imply 
ing  that  the  Christians  were  an  entirely  separate  community.  •/ 
In  the  last  chapter  of  St.  Matthew  (v.  15)  we  have,  'This 
saying  is  commonly  reported  among  the  Jews  unto  this  day.' 
When  it  is  attempted  to  get  rid  of  these  evidences  of  anti-*^ 
Jewish  tendency  by  the  assertion  that  none  of  these  things 
could  have  been  in  the  original  Matthew,  we  can  only  reply, ' 
that  it  is  open  to  anyone  to  say  that  the  original  Matthew 
contained  just  whatever  he  likes.    But  no  theory  can  be  said  to  4 
rest  on  a  scientific  basis  which,  instead  of  taking  cognizance 
of  all  the  facts,  arbitrarily  rejects  whatever  of  them  do  not*.' 
happen  to  accord  with  the  hypothesis. 

It  is  plain  from  what  I  have  said  that,  when  every  ingenuity 
has  been  expended  on  our  documents,  they  fail  to  yield  any 
sufficient  evidence  of  the  bitter  hostility  which,  according  to 
Baur's  theory,  existed  between  the  two  great  sections  of  the 
early   Church ;    and,  therefore,  these   documents   are   con 
demned  by  him  and  his  followers  as,  at  least  in  their  present 
shape,   the  work  of  a  later  age,  which  had  set  to  work  to 
remove  all  traces  of  the  ancient  dissensions.      Baur  acknow-;, 
ledges  only  five  of  our  books  as   genuine   remains   of  thefi 
Apostolic  age — four  Epistles  of  Paul  and  the  Apocalypse.  S 
The  four  Epistles  are  those  to  the  Galatians,  Romans,  and|| 
the  two  to  the  Corinthians.     It  is  not  much  to  be  grateful  for 
that  he  grants  the  genuineness  of  these,  for  they  carry  on 
their  face  such  marks  of  strong  personal  feeling,  and  are  so 
manifestly  not  the  work  of  a  forger,  but  the  outpouring  of  a 
heart  stirred  to  its  depths  by  the  incidents  of  a  real  life,  that 
whoever  should  deny  their  genuineness  would  pronounce  on 
himself  the   sentence  of  incapacity  to  distinguish  true  from 
false.     But  these  Epistles  have,  in  Baur's  eyes,  the  further 
recommendation,  that  they  are  those  in  which  Paul  has  to 


24  INTRODUCTORY.  [ll. 

deal  with  his  Jewish  opponents,  and  therefore  are  the  most 
likely  to  yield  proofs  of  that  jealousy  of  the  elder  Apostles 
and  hostility  to  them  which  Baur's  theory  demands.  After 
wards,  when  I  come  to  speak  of  St.  Paul's  Epistles  and  of 
the  Acts  of  the  Apostles,  I  will  try  to  show  how  little  ground 
there  is  for  the  assertion  that  the  view  of  Paul's  relations  to 
the  heads  of  the  Jerusalem  Church,  exhibited  in  the  Epistle 
to  the  Galatians,  is  irreconcilable  with  that  presented  by  the 
Acts.  If,  indeed,  anyone  imagines  that  the  Apostles  were 

I  not  men  of  like  passions  with  ourselves,  and  therefore  counts 
it  a  thing  impossible  that  one  should  feel  or  express  dissatis- 

'  faction  with  the  conduct  of  another  ;  if  he  cannot  believe  that 
they  should  be  differently  influenced  by  different  aspects  of 
the  truth,  or  be  of  various  opinion  as  to  the  immediate 

( necessity  of  guarding  against  different  forms  of  error  ;  why, 
then,  we  need  not  go  beyond  what  the  Epistle  to  the  Galatians 
tells  of  the  dispute  between  Peter  and  Paul  at  Antioch  in  order 
to  convince  him  of  his  mistake.  But  when  we  have  fully 
conceded  that  there  was  no  rigid  sameness  of  utterance  among 
the  first  preachers  of  the  Gospel,  we  still  fall  immensely  short 
of  what  Baur's  theory  requires  us  to  grant.  In  order  to  adopt 

,  his  view,  we  must  hold  that  the  differences  between  St.  Paul 
and  the  elder  Apostles  were  not  like  those  which  are  known 
to  subsist  at  the  present  day  between  political  leaders  of  the 
same  party — differences  which  do  not  prevent  them  from 
sitting  in  the  same  cabinet  and  joining  in  a  common  policy ; 

(but  rather  like  the  differences  which  separate  the  leaders  of 
opposite  parties,  or  even  of  hostile  states.  The  most  Ultra 
montane  Roman  Catholic  could  not  think  worse  of  Martin 
Luther  than,  if  we  believe  our  modern  guides,  the  members  of 
the  Church  of  Jerusalem  thought  of  St.  Paul.*  The  wildest 
Protestant  could  not  hate  the  Pope  more  than  St.  Paul's 
Gentile  converts  are  imagined  to  have  hated  the  Apostles 

f  of  the  circumcision. 

But  the  most  wonderful  part  of  the  theory  is  the  alleged 

j  *  '  Jamais,  en  effet,  1'Eglise  chretienne  ne  porta  dans  son  seiii  une  cause 
de  schisme  aussi  profonde  que  celle  qui  1'agitait  en  ce  moment.  Luther 
et  le  scolastique  le  plus  routinier  differaient  moms  que  Paul  et  Jacques.' — 
Renan,  St.  Pattl,  p.  289. 


III.]  THE   ANTI-PAULINISM    OF   THE   APOCALYPSE.  25 

end  of  the  schism,  in  which  Peter  and  Paul  came  to  be 
regarded  as  brothers,  and  held  in  equal  honour.  That  is  the 
same  as  if  we  Protestants  held  in  equal  honour  Martin  Luther 
and  Ignatius  Loyola,  and  as  if  it  was  our  popular  belief  that 
these  two  great  saints  had  loved  each  other  as  brethren. 
Surely,  the  Pauline  Christians  must  have  been  the  most  for 
giving  men  in  the  world.  They  had  been  victorious  along 
the  whole  line.  The  Judaizers  had  disappeared.  No  one 
dreamed  of  imposing  the  yoke  of  circumcision  on  the  Gentiles. 
Even  in  the  Clementines  no  such  burden  is  sought  to  be  laid 
on  Gentile  converts.  Yet  these  Gentiles  agreed  in  giving 
equal  honour  to  the  great  Apostle  who  had  gained  them  their 
liberty  and  to  the  bigoted  Jews  who  had  cast  out  his  name  as 
evil,  nicknamed  him  Balaam  and  Simon  Magus,  and  orga 
nized  conspiracy  against  him  wherever  he  taught !  Surely 
this  is  a  theory  not  so  recommended  by  probability  that  we 
can  afford  to  condone  its  deficiency  in  documentary  proof; 
and,  for  my  part,  I  am  well  content  to  abide  by  the  old 
representations  made  by  the  author  of  the  Acts  of  the 
Apostles. 


nj. 
PART     III. 

THE   ANTI-PAULINISM   OF   THE   APOCALYPSE. 

I  HAVE  said  that  the  Apocalypse  is  also  received  by  Baur, 
and  is  acknowledged  by  him  as  a  genuine  work  of  the  Apostle 
John.  It  is  scarcely  necessary  to  say,  that  he  does  not  look 
upon  it  as  containing  any  real  prophecy,  but  merely  antici 
pations  of  the  future,  which  have  been  falsified  by  the  event. 
In  owning  the  Book  of  the  Revelation  to  be  Apostolic,  the 
modern  school  of  destructive  criticism  is  more  easy  of  belief 
than  part  of  the  early  Church  ;  for  in  the  third  century  there 
were  many  who  denied  the  authority  of  this  book,  and  I  shall 
have  occasion  afterwards  to  speak  of  an  argument  by  Diony- 
sius  of  Alexandria,  that  the  difference  in  style  between  this 
book  and  the  Gospel  of  St.  John  proves  that  both  could  not 


26  INTRODUCTORY.  [ill. 

have  the  same  author.      This   argument  has  been   eagerly 
i adopted  by  the  modern  school,  only  with  a  reversal  of  its 
application.     They  hope  now,  by  conceding  that  the  Apoca 
lypse  is  the  work  of  John,  to  found,  upon  differences  of  style, 
an  argument  that  the  fourth  Gospel  cannot  be  his ;  and,  in 
fact,  it  is  now  alleged  to  be  one  of  the  most  certain  results  of 
criticism,  that  these  two  works  cannot  have  the  same  author. 
This,  again,  suggests  a  topic  which  I  will  not  anticipate,  as 
the  argument  must  be  considered  when  I  come  to  discuss  the 
Gospel  according  to  St.  John.    Suffice  it  now  to  say,  that  the 
='  Apocalypse  is  held  to  be  strongly  Jewish  and  anti-Pauline. 

In  the  Epistles  to  the  Seven  Churches,  Paul  is  held  to  be 
the  enemy  against  whom  St.  John,  writing  in  our  Lord's 
name,  warns  his  disciples.     Indeed,  one  German  teacher  of 
this  school  (Volkmar)  carries  out  the  theory  to  the  absurdity 
of  imagining  that  by  the  false  prophet  predicted  as  upholding 
the  power  of  the  Beast  we  are  to  understand  St.  Paul.     In 
the  Epistle  to  the  Church  in  Smyrna  (ii.  9)  we  read: — 'I 
know  the  blasphemy  of  them  which  say  they  are  Jews  and 
are  not,  but  are  the  synagogue  of  Satan.'     And  in  that  to 
the  Church  in  Philadelphia  (iii.  9) : — *  I  will  make  them  of 
the  synagogue  of  Satan  which  say  they  are  Jews  and  are  not, 
but  do  lie,  to  come  and  worship  before  thy  feet.'     We  are 
asked  to  believe  that  those  false  Jews,  with  whom  St.  John 
has  broken   so  entirely  as  to  call  them  the  synagogue  of 
Satan,  are  St.  Paul  and  his  party.     The  angel  of  the  Church 
of  Ephesus   (ii.  2)  is   praised  because   '  he  has  tried  them 
which  say  they  are  apostles,  and  are  not,  and  has  found  them 
liars.'     Here  again  we  are  asked  to  believe  that  it  was  Paul's 
claim  to  apostleship  which  was  thus  rejected ;  and  we  are 
again  and  again  invited  by  Renan  to  notice  the  remarkable 
fact,  that  in  Ephesus,  where  St.  Paul  had  resided  so  long, 
and  laboured  for  a  time  so  successfully,  a  few  years  after  his 
departure  his  followers  had  completely  disappeared,  and  his 
claims  to  apostleship  had  been  generally  owned  to  be  based 
in  falsehood.     Lastly,  you  will  remember  that  in  the  Epistle 
to  the  angel  of  the  Church  in  Pergamos  those  are  condemned 
(ii.  14,  15)  who  '  hold  the  doctrine  of  Balaam,'  and  also  those 
who  '  hold  the  doctrine  of  the  Nicolaitans.'    It  had  been  con- 


III.]  THE   ANTI-PAULINISM    OF    THE   APOCALYPSE.  2J 

jectured  long  since — and  the  conjecture  has  been  received 
with  more  favour  than  I  think  it  deserves — that  Nicolaus, 
'  conqueror  of  the  people/  was  but  a  Greek  translation  of  the 
name  Balaam.  The  etymology  seems  to  me  a  forced  one  ; 
but  Renan  adopts  this  view,  with  the  addition,  that  Balaam 
was  a  nickname  for  St.  Paul,  and  that  the  doctrine  of  Balaam, 
the  teaching  '  to  eat  things  sacrificed  to  idols,  and  to  commit 
fornication  '  (by  which  he  understands  marriage  with  Gentiles, 
regarded  by  strict  Jews  as  fornication),  was  the  doctrine  of 
St.  Paul.  Renan  would  further  have  us  believe  that,  in 
another  New  Testament  place  where  Balaam  is  mentioned, 
St.  Paul  is  intended — I  mean  the  Epistle  of  Jude  (v.  1 1).  For 
though  that  Epistle  is  one  for  which  we  cannot  produce  as 
early  testimony  as  for  the  rest,  and  is  consequently  not  ad 
mitted  into  Baur's  meagre  collection  of  genuine  Apostolic 
Letters,  yet  the  temptation  is  great  to  gain  some  addition  to 
the  scanty  evidence  of  anti-Pauline  rancour  in  the  early 
Church  ;  and  so  we  have  presented  to  us  Jude,  the  brother  of 
James,  describing  Paul  as  a  '  filthy  dreamer,'  who  '  defiled 
the  flesh,  despised  dominion,  and  spoke  evil  of  dignities' 
(namely,  of  the  original  twelve  Apostles),  and  who  '  ran 
greedily  after  the  error  of  Balaam  for  reward.' 

Now  we  can  understand  easily  how  it  was  that  an  obscure 
heretic,  in  the  end  of  the  second  century,  not  daring  to  attack 
Paul  openly,  because  he  knew  that  such  attack  would  have 
condemned  his  book  to  exclusion  from  the  whole  circle  of 
Christian  readers,  masked  his  assault  under  a  false  name  ; 
so  that  while  he  seemed  only  to  expose  the  wickedness  of 
Simon  Magus,  and  could  even,  if  a  question  were  raised  by 
any  of  the  orthodox,  plausibly  maintain  that  no  covert  mean 
ing  was  intended,  he  would  yet  be  understood  by  the  few 
initiated  as  gratifying  their  dislike  to  Paul.  But  Apostles 
such  as  St.  John  and  St.  Jude  would  have  had  no  need  to 
descend  to  such  subterfuges.  It  is  not  consistent  with  the 
character  of  the  outspoken  '  son  of  Thunder '  (either  as  that 
character  is  made  known  to  us  by  Scripture,  or  in  the  tra 
ditional  story  of  his  treatment  of  the  heretic  Cerinthus)  to 
suppose  that,  if  there  were  false  teachers  whom  he  thought 
it  his  duty  to  describe  as  the  synagogue  of  Satan,  he  would 


28  INTRODUCTORY.  [ill. 

have  disguised  the  object  of  his  reprehension  under  the  veil 
of  Balaam  or  Nicolaus,  and  never  have  ventured  to  mention 
the  name  of  Paul.  Why  should  not  John,  one  of  the  pillar 
Apostles  (Gal.  ii.  9)  of  the  Church,  and  Jude,  the  brother  of 
one  of  the  great  three,  have  courage  to  speak  plainly  ?  But 
let  that  pass  :  at  least  their  warning  must  have  been  intelli 
gible  at  the  time  it  was  given.  The  Church  would  have 
known  who  it  was  that  it  was  intended  to  describe  ;  and  if 
so,  is  it  credible  that  the  tradition  should  have  completely 
perished  out  of  memory,  and  that  Christians,  by  whom  the 
great  Apostle  of  the  Gentiles  was  held  in  the  highest  love 
and  veneration,  should  still  cherish  these  letters  to  the  Seven 
Churches,  and  this  Epistle  of  St.  Jude,  never  once  dreaming 
that  they  were  honouring  party  pamphlets  of  an  opposing 
school ? 

It  is  worth  while  to  remark  how  singularly  obtuse  the 
Paulinist  party  were  as  to  the  meaning  of  the  assaults  levelled 
against  their  master ;  or  at  least  at  what  an  early  date  all 
knowledge  as  to  the  true  meaning  of  these  assaults  had  per 
ished.  I  have  already  remarked  how  innocently  the  author 
of  the  Acts  of  the  Apostles  tells  the  story  of  Simon  Magus, 
without  betraying  any  suspicion  that  under  the  mask  of  this 
arch-heretic  Paul  was  to  be  recognized.  Twice  in  the  Acts 
(xv.  20,  29  ;  xxi.  25)  the  same  writer  goes  out  of  his  way  to 
represent  the  Apostolic  heads  of  the  Church  of  Jerusalem  as 
condemning  the  eating  meat  offered  to  idols  and  fornication, 
in  evident  ignorance  that  these  two  things  were  prominent 
heads  of  the  accusation  brought  against  the  Pauline  Chris 
tians  by  their  Jewish  opponents.  Nay,  St.  Paul  himself  is 
represented  as  concurring  in  the  condemnation,  and  as  ac 
tively  employed  in  disseminating  it  (xv.  25  ;  xvi.  4).  Once 
more,  the  author  of  the  Second  Epistle  of  Peter  (who,  if  he 
were  not  Peter  himself,  certainly  wrote  at  an  early  date,  and 
(iii.  15)  was  an  ardent  admirer  of  Paul)  adopts  as  his  own 
(ii.  15)  all  that  was  said  in  Jude's  Epistle  about  Balaam,  the 
son  of  Beor,  and  clearly  has  not  the  smallest  suspicion  that 
under  that  name  Peter's  '  beloved  brother '  Paul  was  in 
tended. 

I  shall  have  occasion  to  say  something  hereafter  as  to  the 


III.]  THE   ANTI-PAULINISM    OF    THE    APOCALYPSE.  29 

use  of  tradition  in  the  interpretation  of  Scripture,  and  the 
present  instance  serves  very  well  to  illustrate  what  that  use 
is.  For  you  can  see  that  these  theories  as  to  the  reference 
to  Paul,  both  in  the  Apocalypse  and  in  the  Epistle  of  Jude, 
might  have  deserved  some  respectful  consideration  had  they 
dated  from  the  first  century  instead  of  the  nineteenth.  If  it 
had  been  the  case  that  in  early  times  there  was  hesitation  to 
acknowledge  the  authority  of  these  books,  on  the  ground 
that  they  disparaged  the  apostleship  of  Paul,  then  we  should 
be  bound  to  look  the  possibility  in  the  face,  that  tradition 
had  preserved  correctly  the  interpretation  put  on  these  docu 
ments  by  those  to  whom  they  were  first  addressed,  and  to 
inquire  dispassionately  whether  that  interpretation  were  the 
right  one.  But  an  interpretation  is  condemned  at  once  by 
the  mere  fact  that  it  was  left  to  the  nineteenth  century  to 
discover  it,  and  we  may  fairly  refuse  to  give  it  any  respectful 
hearing.  But  I  think  it  well  not  to  cut  the  matter  short,  as  I 
might ;  and  will  go  on  to  show  that  we  can  find  parallels  in 
Paul's  Epistles  for  all  the  passages  that  are  cited  from  the 
Apocalypse  as  anti-Pauline. 

It  must  be  remembered  that  the  doctrine  of  the  calling  of  the 
Gentiles  is  taught  as  distinctly  in  the  Book  of  the  Revelation 
as  in  the  saying  of  the  Gospel  (x.  16) — '  Other  sheep  I  have 
which  are  not  of  this  fold.'  We  read,  indeed,  in  the  Apoca 
lypse  of  a  sealing  of  12,000  out  of  each  of  the  tribes  of  Israel 
(vii.  4-8) ;  but  immediately  after  the  account  of  the  bringing 
in  of  this  large  but  still  finite  number  of  Jews  there  follows  : 
4  After  this  I  beheld,  and  lo,  a  great  multitude,  which  no  man 
could  number,  of  all  nations,  and  kindreds,  and  people,  and 
tongues,  stood  before  the  throne,  and  before  the  Lamb, 
clothed  with  white  robes,  and  palms  in  their  hands.'  And  in 
the  mouth  of  the  redeemed  is  placed  a  new  song  unto  the 
Lamb,  '  who  has  redeemed  them  to  God  by  His  blood  out  of 
every  kindred,  and  tongue,  and  people,  and  nation  '  (v.  Q). 
The  Apocalypse  is  said  to  be  Jewish,  because  the  heavenly 
city  is  described  under  the  name  of  the  New  Jerusalem 
(xxi.  2) ;  but  this  is  the  very  language  of  St.  Paul  in  his  most 
anti-Jewish  Epistle — '  Jerusalem,  which  is  above,  is  freer 
which  is  the  mother  of  us  all '  (Gal.  iv.  26).  For  the  literal 


30  INTRODUCTORY.  [ill. 

Jerusalem  the  Apocalypse  has  no  more  complimentary  names 
than  Sodom  and  Egypt  (xi.  8). 

I  have  already  quoted  the  use  made  of  the  words  '  those 
who  say  they  are  Jews,  and  are  not ' — words  imagined  to  refer 
to  St.  Paul  and  his  school.  Those  who  give  them  this  refe 
rence  have  read  Paul's  Epistles  very  carelessly,  and  have 
failed  to  notice  one  of  his  most  characteristic  traits.  It  is, 
that  this  Apostle,  who  combats  so  strenuously  the  notion  that 
the  Jew  was  to  possess  exclusive  privileges  in  Christ's  king 
dom,  and  that  circumcision  was  to  be  the  condition  of  admis 
sion  to  it,  still  retained,  as  was  natural  in  a  Jew  by  birth,  his 
attachment  to  the  name  of  Jew  and  the  name  of  circumcision. 
Educated  as  he  had  been  to  regard  these  as  titles  of  honour, 
and  to  look  down  on  the  uncircumcised  Gentile,  it  pains  him 
to  hear  his  disciples  called  by  the  name  of  the  uncircumcision, 
and  he  contends  that  they  were  the  true  Jews — theirs  the  only 
true  circumcision.  In  the  Epistle  to  the  Ephesians  (ii.  n) 
he  speaks  of  his  Gentile  followers  as  those  '  who  were  called 
uncircumcision  by  that  which  is  called  the  circumcision  in 
the  flesh,  made  by  hands.'  He  tells  these  Gentiles  (Col.  ii. 
1 1),  'ye  are  circumcised  with  the  circumcision  made  without 
hands,  in  putting  oft*  the  body  of  the  sins  of  the  flesh  by  the 
circumcision  of  Christ.'  In  the  Epistle  to  the  Philippians, 
when  about  to  give  to  the  Jews  the  name  of  the  circumcision, 
he  checks  himself,  and  calls  them  instead  the  'concision'; 
'  for  we,'  he  says,  '  are  the  circumcision,  which  worship  God 
in  the  spirit,  and  rejoice  in  Christ  Jesus,  and  have  no  confi 
dence  in  the  flesh'  (iii.  2).  In  the  Epistle  to  the  Galatians 
he  claims  for  those  who  walk  according  to  his  rule  the 
glorious  title  of  the  '  Israel  of  God  '  (vi.  16).  And  in  a  well- 
known  passage  in  the  Epistle  to  the  Romans  (ii.  28)  the  same 
doctrine  is  summed  up.  '  He  is  not  a  Jew,  which  is  one  out- 
"  wardly ;  neither  is  that  circumcision,  which  is  outward  in  the 
x  flesh  :  but  he  is  a  Jew,  which  is  one  inwardly ;  and  circum 
cision  is  that  of  the  heart,  in  the  spirit,  and  not  in  the  letter ; 
\  whose  praise  is  not  of  men,  but  of  God.' 

I  suppose  there  is  no  stronger  mark  of  genuineness  in 
Paul's  Epistles,  nor  any  trait  less  likely  to  have  occurred  to 
a  forger,  than  this,  that  his  affection  for  the  names  of  Jew 


III.]  THE   ANTI-PAULINISM    OF  THE   APOCALYPSE.  31 

and  of  circumcision  clings  to  him  long  after  he  had  ceased  to 
attach  any  value  to  the  things.  It  need  not  surprise  us  to 
find  the  same  trait  in  St.  John,  who  had  grown  up  subject  to 
the  same  influences ;  and  we  cannot  hesitate  to  believe  that 
those  against  whom  the  Seven  Churches  were  warned  were 
the  unbelieving  Jews,  who  are  pronounced  unworthy  of  the 
name  of  Jews,  and  whose  synagogue  is  called  the  synagogue 
of  Satan.  It  deserves  to  be  mentioned  that  the  Jews  in  Asia 
Minor  long  continued  to  be  the  most  bitter  adversaries  of 
the  Christian  name,  and  that,  when  Polycarp  was  martyred,, 
the  Jews  were  most  active  in  collecting  materials  for  the  pyre: 
on  which  to  burn  him  (Mart.  S.  Polyc.  xiv.,Euseb.  H.  E.  iv.  15).' 

As  little  need  it  be  supposed  that  in  those  '  who  say  that 
they  are  apostles,  and  are  not,'  we  must  recognize  St.  Paul. 
Here  again  we  have  an  exact  parallel  in  St.  Paul's  Epistles  : 
'Such  are  false  apostles,  deceitful  workers,  transforming^ 
themselves  into  the  apostles  of  Christ'  (2  Cor.  xi.  13).  And 
if  any  proof  were  needed  of  the  falsity  of  the  assertion  that 
the  Ephesian  Church,  ten  years  after  St.  Paul  had  founded  it, 
rejected  his  claims  to  apostleship,  it  would  be  furnished  by 
what  immediately  follows.  For,  according  to  Kenan's  hy 
pothesis,  the  Church  of  Ephesus  had  at  the  commencement 
been  beguiled  into  accepting  Paul's  pretensions,  and  there 
fore  would  be  bound  to  look  back  with  some  shame  and 
regret  on  its  early  simplicity.  Is  there  any  trace  of  this  in 
the  Apocalyptic  Epistle  ?  Nay ;  the  first  state  of  the  Church 
is  recalled  as  its  palmy  days.  The  Church  is  blamed  for 
having  left  its  first  love,  and  commanded  to  remember 
whence  it  had  fallen,  and  repent  and  do  the  first  works 
(ii-  4>  5)- 

I  must  not  omit  to  call  attention  to  the  extraordinary 
rapidity  ascribed  to  the  supposed  counter-revolution  in  favour 
of  Paulinism.  For  if  we  are  to  believe  this  theory  the  elder 
Apostles  must  have  persevered  to  the  end  of  their  lives  in 
treating  Paul  as  an  enemy.  St.  John,  who  was  their  last  sur 
vivor,  must  have  continued  to  hold  up  Paul  and  his  disciples 
to  odium  after  the  death  of  the  Apostle  of  the  Gentiles.  No 
one  dates  the  Apocalypse  earlier  than  the  year  69,  at  which 
time,  according  to  all  tradition,  Paul  was  dead.  Up  to  that!- 


32  INTRODUCTORY.  [ill. 

time,  therefore,  those  who  might  be  regarded  as  having  the 
best  authority  to  speak  had  disowned  Paul  as  a  false  Christian. 
Paul  therefore  must  have  died  an  excommunicated  heretic. 
Yet,  in  a  quarter  of  a  century  later — for  that  is  now  the  re 
ceived  date  of  Clement's  Roman  Epistle — Paul  is  universally 
regarded  as  one  of  the  chief  of  the  Apostles,  and  as  having 
been  the  cherished  partner  of  Peter,  both  in  work  and  in 
suffering!  (Clem.  Rom.  5.) 

I  have  spent  more  time  than  you  may  have  thought  neces 
sary  in  refuting  an  utterly  baseless  hypothesis  ;  but  my  excuse 
is,  that  this  hypothesis  is  treated  as  authentic  history  in  almost 
all  modern  works  in  England,  Germany,  and  France,  which 
profess  to  give  the  latest  results  of  critical  science  as  applied 
to  our  sacred  books. 


IV. 

RECEPTION  OF  THE  GOSPELS  IN  THE  EARLY 
CHURCH. 


PART    I. 

THE     END     OF     THE     SECOND     CENTURY. 
IREN^US,    CLEMENT,    AND    TERTULLIAN. 

IF  I  were  lecturing  on  Christian  Evidences,  I  should  com 
mence  my  examination  of  the  books  of  the  New  Testa 
ment  with  the  Epistles  of  St.  Paul.  There  are  some  of  these 
which  are  owned  to  be  genuine  by  the  most  sceptical  critics, 
and  these  universally  admitted  Epistles  are  rich  in  autobio 
graphical  details,  and  set  Paul  vividly  before  us  as  a  real 
living,  working  character.  In  connexion  with  Paul's  Epistles 
we  should  consider  the  book  of  the  Acts  of  the  Apostles, 
the  latter  half  of  which  bears  undeniable  marks  of  having 
emanated  from  a  companion  of  St.  Paul.  We  have  thus  the 
fullest  knowledge  what  Paul  believed  and  taught,  and  to 
what  sources  of  information  he  had  access.  We  cannot 
doubt  that  Paul  was  thoroughly  sincere  in  his  belief  of  what 
he  preached ;  and  it  is  certain,  also,  that  the  central  topic  of 
his  preaching  was  Christ's  Resurrection.  '  He  is  never  weary 
of  referring  to  this  cardinal  fact.  He  does  not  defend  or 
prove  it,  but  constantly  assumes  it  as  a  fundamental  fact 
about  which  no  believer  has  any  doubt  whatever.'  This  fact 
which  Paul  receives  so  confidently  was  in  his  time  only  a  few 
years  old ;  and,  without  discussing  Paul's  claims  to  have 
himself  seen  his  risen  Master,  it  is  unquestionable  that  he 
was  on  terms  of  intercourse  with  Peter,  James,  John,  and 

D 


34  THE   GOSPELS   IN   THE    EARLY   CHURCH.  [iV. 

others  who  claimed  to  be  original  witnesses  of  the  Resurrec 
tion.  If  we  desire  to  know  what  else  Paul  taught  concerning 
the  events  of  our  Saviour's  life,  we  have  the  answer  in  St. 
Luke's  Gospel,  which  is  of  indisputably  common  authorship 
with  the  Acts,  and  therefore  proceeded  from  a  member  of 
Paul's  company. 

The  order  of  taking  the  New  Testament  books  which  I 
have  thus  sketched  offers  some  advantages,  but,  owing  to 
inconveniences  resulting  from  adopting  it,  which  I  will  not 
delay  to  describe  at  length,  I  have  fallen  back  on  the  obvious 
course  of  commencing  with  the  Gospels.  If  we  can  establish 
that  the  Gospels  contain  the  story  told  at  the  time  by  men 
who  were  eye-witnesses  of  what  they  related,  and  who  con 
firmed  their  testimony  by  their  sufferings,  then,  full  of  mi 
racles  as  our  Gospels  are,  it  has  been  found  practically 
impossible  to  refuse  belief  to  them.  But  if  the  Gospels 
were  written  a  hundred  years  or  more  after  the  events  which 
they  describe  ;  if  the  story  is  not  told  by  eye-witnesses,  but 
has  been  improved  by  passing  through  several  hands  ;  if  there 
has  been  time  for  floating  myth  and  legend  to  gather  round 
the  simple  facts,  and  for  men's  preconceived  notions  of  what 
the  Messiah  ought  to  do,  to  ornament  the  history  of  what 
Jesus  did ;  then  the  intrinsic  improbability  of  every  miracu 
lous  story  outweighs  second-hand  testimony  separated  from 
the  original  witnesses  by  so  long  an  interval.  Of  the  two, 
however,  it  is  a  more  vital  matter  with  unbelievers  to  reject 
the  early  date  of  the  Gospels  than  for  us  to  assert  it.  Bring 
down  the  date  of  the  Gospels  as  low  as  the  most  courageous 
of  our  adversaries  can  venture  to  bring  them,  and  though  we 
thus  lose  the  proof  of  the  greater  part  of  the  wonderful  works 
of  the  Saviour's  life,  the  great  miracle  of  the  Resurrection 
remains  untouched.  Take  St.  Paul's  abridged  account  of  the 
Gospel  he  had  received,  as  given  in  an  unquestioned  Epistle 
(i  Cor.  xv.  3-7),  and,  though  it  is  so  much  shorter  than  any 
of  the  four,  it  contains  quite  as  much  stumbling-block  for  an 
anti-supernaturalist — 'that  Christ  died  for  our  sins,  accord 
ing  to  the  Scriptures ;  that  He  was  buried,  and  that  He  rose 
again  the  third  day,  according  to  the  Scriptures  ;  that  He  was 
seen  of  Cephas,  then  of  the  twelve ;  after  that  He  was  seen  of 


IV.]        THE  END  OF  THE  SECOND  CENTURY.          35 

above  five  hundred  brethren  at  once  ;  after  that  He  was  seen 
of  James,  then  of  all  the  Apostles.'  Thus,  from  Paul's  writings 
and  from  other  historical  evidence,  we  can  still  show  that 
men  who  could  not  easily  have  been  deceived  as  to  the  truth 
of  what  they  asserted,  and  who  proved  their  sincerity  by  their 
readiness  to  face  sufferings  and  martyrdom  in  attestation  of 
their  doctrine,  declared  that  Jesus  of  Nazareth,  the  third  day 
after  He  had  died  on  the  cross,  rose  again  from  the  dead. 
If  this  one  fact  be  proved,  the  cardinal  principle  of  the  anti- 
supernaturalists,  the  impossibility  of  miracle,  is  demolished. 
Christianity  thus  could  survive  the  loss  of  the  Gospels  ;  but 
infidelity  is  incompatible  with  the  admission  of  them,  as  is? 
evidenced  by  Strauss's  confession,  already  quoted,  that  if  thei; 
Gospels  be  recognized  as  historical  sources,  miracle  cannot  i> 
be  eliminated  from  the  life  of  Jesus. 

In  beginning  our  inquiry  concerning  the  Gospels,  I  need 
not  take  you  much  later  than,  at  the  latest,  the  year  180.  In 
every  controversy  it  is  always  well  to  see  what  facts  are  un 
disputed  which  can  be  taken  as  common  ground  between  the 
parties.  Now,  to  use  the  words  of  Strauss,  '  it  is  certain  that,  ^ 
towards  the  end  of  the  second  century,  the  same  four  Gospels 
which  we  have  still  are  found  recognized  in  the  Church,  and 
are  repeatedly  quoted  as  the  writings  of  the  Apostles,  and 
disciples  of  the  Apostles,  whose  names  they  bear,  by  the 
three  most  eminent  ecclesiastical  teachers — Irenaeus  in  Gaul, 
Clement  in  Alexandria,  and  Tertullian  in  Carthage.  There 
were,  indeed,  current  other  Gospels,  used  not  only  by  here 
tical  parties,  but  sometimes  appealed  to  by  orthodox  teachers  ( 
— a  Gospel  of  the  Hebrews  and  of  the  Egyptians,  a  Gospel 
of  Peter,  of  Bartholomew,  of  Thomas,  of  Matthias,  of  the 
Twelve  Apostles — but  the  four  were,  at  that  time,  and  from 
that  time  downwards,  considered  as  the  peculiarly  trustworthy 
foundation  on  which  the  Christian  faith  rested'  (Leben  Jesu 
§  10,  p.  47).  I  will  speak  a  little  about  each  of  these  witnesses 
— viz.  Irenaeus,  Clement,  and  Tertullian.  They  are  widely 
separated  in  space,  and  they  represent  the  whole  extent  of 
the  Christian  world.  They  prove  that,  if  there  had  been  any 
previous  doubt  or  uncertainty  which  of  all  the  documents 
purporting  to  contain  records  of  the  Saviour's  life  were  to  be 

D2 


36  THE   GOSPELS   IN   THE    EARLY   CHURCH.  [iv. 

regarded  as  of  superior  authority,  that  doubt  had  been  re 
moved  before  the  end  of  the  second  century,  and  that  the 
four  Gospels  which  we  recognize  had  then  been  established 
in  the  place  of  pre-eminence  which  they  have  held  ever 
since. 

Irenaeus  was  Bishop  of  Lyons,  in  Gaul,  about  the  year 
1 80.*  But  Irenaeus  not  only  represents  the  testimony  of  the 
Gallican  Church  ;  he  had  been  himself  brought  up  in  Asia 
Minor,  from  which  country  Gaul  had,  as  we  have  every 
reason  to  believe,  derived  its  Christianity  as  well  as  its  early 
civilization.  There  remains  (ap.  Euseb.  H.  E.  v.  2)  a  most 
interesting  record  of  the  connexion  between  the  two  countries 
in  an  affecting  narrative  of  the  persecution  of  the  year  177, 
addressed  by  the  Christians  of  Vienne  and  Lyons  to  their 
brethren  in  Asia  Minor.  This  Epistle,  though  it  does  not 
quote  any  of  the  books  of  the  New  Testament  by  name,  is  so 
full  of  passages  in  which  the  writer  makes  the  language  of 
these  books  his  own — weaving  texts  into  the  narrative,  as 
you  constantly  hear  preachers  doing  at  the  present  day — that 
we  cannot  doubt  that  the  sacred  books  in  use  in  that  early 
Church  were  in  the  main  the  same  as  the  books  of  our  own 
New  Testament.  The  bishop  at  the  time  of  that  persecution 
was  Pothinus,  a  man  of  about  ninety  years  of  age,  who  must, 
therefore,  have  been  born  before  some  at  least  of  the  books  of 
the  New  Testament  were  written,  and  who  must  have  mixed 
with  men  contemporary  with  St.  John.  His  presbyter  and 
successor,  Irenaeus,  was  united  by  other  links  to  the  times  of 
the  Apostles.  He  tells  us  how  well  he  remembered  Poly- 
carp,!  whom  in  his  early  years  he  had  known  at  Smyrna : 
'  I  can  recall  the  very  place  where  Polycarp  used  to  sit  and 
teach,  his  manner  of  speech,  his  mode  of  life,  his  appearance, 
|the  style  of  his  address  to  the  people,  his  frequent  references 
no  St.  John,  and  to  others  who  had  seen  our  Lord  ;  how  he 
used  to  repeat  from  memory  their  discourses,  and  the  things 

*  Lipsius,  in  the  'Dictionary  of  Christian  Biography,'  assigns  A.D.  130 
as  the  most  probable  date  of  the  birth  of  Irenseus  ;  and  the  period  (180-188) 
as  that  in  which  it  is  likely  that  the  different  books  of  his  treatise  against 
heresies  were  published. 

f  Recent  investigations  determine  A.D.  155  as  the  date  of  the  martyrdom 
of  Polycarp,  at  which  time  he  was  about  eighty-six  years  old. 


IV.]  IRENJEUS.  37 

which  he  had  heard  from  them  concerning  our  Lord,  His 
miracles,  and  His  teaching;  and  how,  being  instructed  him-^ 
self  by  those   who  were   eye-witnesses  of  the   life  of  the 
Word,  there  was  in  all  that  he  said  a  strict  agreement  with 
the  Scriptures'  (Epistle  to  Florinus,  ap.  Euseb.  H.  E.  v.  20). 
Observe  this  word  'Scriptures,'  for  it  is  plain  that  the  books 
to  which  he  gave  this  venerated  title  are  those  which  contain^ 
the  record  of  our  Lord's  life — the  four  Gospels. 

There  is  a  passage  in  the  work  of  Irenaeus  against  heresies 
which  proves  that  he  considered  these  books  as,  in  the 
highest  sense  of  the  word,  Scriptures  given  by  inspiration  of 
God.  The  passage  is  interesting  as  bearing  testimony  to  a 
New  Testament  reading  not  found  in  our  existing  Greek 
manuscripts ;  but  only  in  the  Latin  and  in  the  Curetonian 
Syriac  versions.  It  concerns  the  passage  where  we  now  read, 
in  the  opening  of  St.  Matthew's  Gospel,  *  The  birth  of  Jesus 
Christ  was  on  this  wise'  (i.  18).  Irenaeus  is  arguing  against 
those  who  held  that  Jesus  was  at  first  but  an  ordinary  man, 
and  only  became  Christ  when  the  Holy  Spirit  descended  on 
Him  in  His  baptism ;  and  he  remarks  (in.  xvi.  2)  that 
Matthew  might  have  said  that  '  the  birth  of  Jesus  was  on  this 
wise,'  but  that  the  Holy  Spirit,  foreseeing  the  depravers  of 
the  truth,  and  guarding  against  their  fraud,  said  by  Matthew, 
*  The  birth  of  Christ  was  on  this  wise,'  *  showing  that  Christ 
was  born  ;  in  other  words,  that  Jesus  was  Christ  from  His 
birth.  Thus  what  might  seem  the  accidental  choice  of  one 
form  of  expression  rather  than  another  is  ascribed  to  the 
directing  care  of  the  Holy  Spirit.  You  see  then  that  Irenaeus 
believed  not  only  in  the  genuineness,  but  also  in  the  inspira 
tion,  of  the  Gospels. 

1  dare  say  you  have  also  heard  of  his  reasons  why  there 
are  exactly  four  Gospels,  neither  more  nor  less.  He  argues 
(in.  xi.  8)  that  the  Gospel  is  the  pillar  of  the  Church  ;  the 
Church  is  spread  over  the  whole  world ;  the  world  has  four 
quarters ;  therefore  it  is  fitting  there  should  also  be  four 
Gospels.  Again,  the  Gospel  is  the  divine  breath,  or  wind  of 


*  Potuerat  dicere  Matthaeus,  '  Jesu  veto  generatio  sic  erat' ;  sed  prae- 
videns  Spiritus  Sanctus  depravatores  et  praemuniens  contra  fraudulentiam 
eorum,  per  Matthaeum  ait  '  Christi  autem  generatio  sic  erat.' 


38  THE   GOSPELS   IN   THE    EARLY   CHURCH.  [iV. 

life  for  men  ;  there  are  four  chief  winds ;  therefore,  four 
Gospels.  He  builds  another  argument  on  the  fourfold 
appearance  of  the  cherubim.  The  cherubim,  he  says,  are 
fourfold,  and  their  faces  are  images  of  the  activity  of  the  Son 
of  God.  The  first  beast  was  like  a  lion,  signifying  His 
commanding  and  kingly  dignity ;  the  second  like  a  calf,  signi 
fying  His  priestly  office ;  the  third  like  a  man,  denoting  His 
Incarnation  ;  the  fourth  like  an  eagle,  denoting  the  Holy 
Spirit  flying  over  the  Church.  Like  these  are  the  Gospels. 
John,  who  begins  with  the  Godhead  and  descent  from  the 
Father,  is  the  lion ;  Luke,  who  begins  with  the  priesthood 
and  sacrifice  of  Zacharias,  is  the  calf;  Matthew,  who  begins 
with  His  human  genealogy,  the  man  ;  Mark,  the  eagle,  who 
commences  with  the  announcement  of  the  prophetic  spirit — 
'  the  beginning  of  the  Gospel  as  it  is  written  by  Isaiah  the 
prophet.'  You  are  aware,  I  dare  say,  that  this  is  not  the 
apportionment  of  the  four  beasts  to  the  Gospels  which  ulti 
mately  prevailed  in  the  West,  John  being  usually  represented 
as  the  eagle ;  Matthew  as  the  man  ;  Luke  as  the  ox ;  and 
Mark  as  the  lion.* 

Irenaeus  goes  on  to  say  that  Christ's  dealings  with  the 
world  are  fourfold.  To  the  patriarchs  the  word  of  God  came 
directly ;  to  those  under  the  Law  through  the  priestly  office  ;. 
Christ  Himself  came  as  man ;  since  then  He  has  dealt  with 
the  Church  by  His  Spirit  overshadowing  the  Church  with 
His  wings.  Thus  the  Gospel  also  is  fourfold,  and  those 
destroy  its  fundamental  conception  who  make  the  number 
either  greater  or  less  ;  either  desiring  to  seem  to  have  found 
out  more  than  the  truth,  or  rejecting  part  of  God's  dispensa 
tion.  The  main  point  in  this  quotation  is,  that  Irenaeus 
considers  the  fourfold  character  of  the  Gospel  to  have  been 

*  This  apportionment  seems  to  have  been  introduced  into  the  West  by 
St.  Ambrose  (in  Luc.  Praef.  8).  It  was  made  more  widely  known  by 
St.  Jerome,  who  professes  therein  to  follow  preceding  expositors  (Praef. 
in.  Matt.;  in  Ezek.  i.  6).  St.  Augustine  (De  Consens.  Evangg.  i.  9) 
adopts  the  same  apportionment,  except  that  he  assigns  the  lion  to  St. 
Matthew,  and  the  man  to  St.  Mark.  He  mentions  also  the  arrangement 
of  Irenseus,  but  considers  that  this  being  founded  merely  on  the  manner 
in  which  the  several  Gospels  begin,  is  inferior  to  an  arrangement  founded 
on  their  general  contents.  The  three  terrestrial  animals,  for  instance,  are 
fitly  assigned  to  the  three  Gospels  which  are  mainly  occupied  with  our 


IV.]  IRENJEUS.  39 

divinely  arranged.  We  are  not  concerned  with  the  validity 
of  his  mystical  explanations,  but  with  the  manifest  inference 
that  the  pre-eminence  of  four  Evangelists  must  have  been, 
in  the  time  of  Irenaeus,  long  established,  else  he  would  not 
thus  ascribe  it  to  divine  appointment.  Strauss  quotes  these 
mystical  explanations  of  Irenaeus  with  a  view  to  disparage 
his  testimony;  but  he  is  forced  to  admit  that  the  fanciful 
character  of  his  reasons  why  there  are  only  four  Gospels 
does  not  discredit  his  testimony  to  the  fact  that  four,  and 
only  four,  were  then  acknowledged  by  the  universal  Church  ; 
and  he  owns  that  the  reasons  given  by  Irenaeus  are  not  his 
grounds  for  receiving  only  four  Gospels,  but  only  his  mode 
of  justifying  a  belief  adopted  on  other  grounds.*  Thus  you? 
see  that,  without  producing  a  single  other  witness,  we  have 
proof  that  towards  the  end  of  the  second  century  the  Church 
held  the  belief  that  is  commonly  held  by  the  Church  of  the 
present  day,  namely,  that  the  four  Gospels  are  to  be  venerated 
as  inspired  records  of  our  Saviour's  life,  and  that  no  others^, 
can  be  placed  on  a  level  with  these. 

Test  by  the  evidence  of  this  one  witness  the  theory  of 
some,  that  St.  John's  Gospel  made  its  first  appearance  about 
the  year  150  or  160.  Is  it  credible  that,  if  so,  Irenaeus  could 
have  accepted  a  forgery  of  which,  according  to  the  hypothesis, 
his  master,  Polycarp,  had  never  told  him  a  word  ?  For  Poly- 
carp,  who,  as  I  said  just  now,  used  to  repeat  from  memory 
the  discourses  which  he  had  heard  from  John,  could  not  have 
been  silent  about  this  work,  which,  if  genuine,  would  be  St. 
John's  most  precious  legacy  to  the  Church  ;  and  the  fact 
that  it  had  not  been  mentioned  by  Polycarp  would  convince 
Irenaeus  that  it  was  an  audacious  imposture.  And  again,  it 
is  impossible  that  Polycarp  could  have  accepted  as  genuine 

Lord's  earthly  life :  the  eagle,  to  the  spiritual  Gospel  of  St.  John,  who 
soars  above  the  clouds  of  human  infirmity,  and  with  unwavering  eyes  gazes 
on  the  light  of  immutable  truth. 

*  'Diese  seltsame  Beweisfiihrung  1st  zwar  nicht  so  zu  verstehen,  als 
waren  die  angegebenen  Umstande  der  Grund  gewesen,warum  Irenaus  nicht 
mehr  und  nicht  weniger  Evangelien  annahm ;  vielmehr  hatten  sich  diese 
vier  eben  damals  in  den  Kreisen  der  nach  Glaubenseinheit  strebenden 
katholischen  Kirche  in  vorzuglichen  Credit  gesetzt,  und  dieses  gegebene 
Verhaltniss  suchte  sich  Irenaus  im  Geiste  seiner  Zeit  zurechtzulegen  (§  10, 
p.  48). 


4-0  THE   GOSPELS    IN   THE   EARLY   CHURCH.  [iV. 

a  work  of  which  he  had  never  heard  his  master,  John,  speak. 
There  are,  in  short,  three  links  in  the  chain — St.  John,  Poly- 
carp,  Irenaeus ;  and  I  do  not  see  how  it  is  possible  to  dissever 
any  one  of  them  from  the  other  two. 

Similar  observations  may  be  made  about  the  conclusions 
of  the  author   of  the  work  called  '  Supernatural  Religion.' 
Other  sceptical  writers   had  thought  they  had   done   great 
things  if  they  could  bring  John's  Gospel  as  late  as  150  or  160, 
allowing  the  Synoptic  Gospels  to  date  from  the  beginning  of 
the  century.     This  writer  imagines  that  he  has  demolished 
all  evidence  for  the  existence  of  the  Synoptic  Gospels  prior 
to  the  age  of  Irenaeus,  and  will  only  allow  them  to  count  from 
the  very  end  of  the  second  century.     But  it  is  plain  that  the 
evidence  of  Irenaeus,  even  if  we  had  no  other,  takes  us  back 
a  long  way  behind  his  own  time.      Books  newly  come  into 
existence  in  his  time  could  not  have  been  venerated  as  he 
venerated  the  Gospels.     What  length  of  time  must  we  allow 
for  these  books  to  have  come  into  such  esteem,  that  what 
might  be  regarded  as  their  chance  expressions  should  be 
considered  as  directed  by  the  Spirit  of  God,  and  that  among 
all  the  different  attempts  to  relate  the  life  of  Christ  none 
should  seem  fit  to  be  put  in  comparison  with  these  four  ?     I 
suppose  fifty  years  would  be  a  very  moderate  allowance  of 
time  for  such  a  growth  of  opinion  :  for  the  credit  of  these 
books  mainly  rested  on  a  belief  that  they  were  of  apostolic 
origin,  and  if  they  had  been  anywhere  known  to  have  been 
recent  modifications  of  an  older  story,  they  could  not  have 
superseded  their  progenitors  ;  so  that  we  may  fairly  conclude 
that  the  time  of  their   appearance  was   beyond  then  living 
memory.     Well,  then,  what  we  have  thus  learned  from  Ire 
naeus  is  of  important  use  when  we  come  presently  to  look  at 
the  works  of  the  generation  next  before  him.      When  we 
find  in  these  works  what  seem  to  be  quotations  from  our 
Gospels,  we  shall  not  easily  be  persuaded  by  small  verbal 
differences  that  the  writers  are  drawing  from  some  unknown 
sources,  and  not  from  books  which  we  are  certain,  from  Ire 
naeus,  must  in  their  time  have  existed,  and  have  been  of  such 
credit  in  the  Church  as  to  be  well  known  to  these  writers. 
The  second  witness  to  whom  I  have  appealed  gives  us  the 


IV.]  CLEMENT    OF   ALEXANDRIA.  41 

verdict  of  another  large  portion  of  the  Christian  world.  Cle 
ment*  of  Alexandria  lived  in  what  was  perhaps  the  city  in  all 
the  world  where  literary  criticism  was  most  cultivated.  He 
had  been  there  the  disciple  of  Pantaenus,  who  very  possibly 
may  have  been  personally  connected  with  disciples  of  the 
Apostles.  And  Clement  travelled  and  learned  from  other  in 
structors  of  various  nations,  whose  names  he  does  not  tell  us, 
but  only  their  nationalities,  an  Ionian,  an  Italian,  a  Syrian,  an 
Egyptian,  an  Assyrian,  a  Hebrew  in  Palestine.  '  These  men,' 
as  he  says,  'preserving  the  true  tradition  of  the  blessed  teach 
ing  directly  from  Peter  and  James,  from  John  and  Paul,  son 
receiving  it  from  father,  came  by  God's  providence  even  to 
us,  to  deposit  among  us  those  seeds  of  truth  which  were  de 
rived  from  their  ancestors  and  the  Apostles  '  (Strom,  i.  u). 
It  is  needless  to  quote  particular  passages  from  Clement : 
suffice  it  to  say,  that  there  is  no  more  doubt  as  to  his  use  of 
the  Gospels  than  there  is  as  to  the  place  assigned  them  by 
any  clergyman  of  the  present  day.  He  has  traditions  to  tell 
concerning  the  composition  of  Mark's  and  of  John's  Gospel, 
both  of  which  he  regards  as  later  than  Matthew's  and  Luke's. 
That,  like  Irenaeus,  he  recognized  as  authoritative  four  Gos 
pels,  neither  more  nor  less,  may  be  inferred  from  the  manner 
in  which  he  deals  with  a  saying  ascribed  to  our  Lord  (Strom. 
\\\.  13) — '  We  have  not  this  saying  in  the  four  Gospels  which 
have  been  handed  down  to  us  ;  it  is  found  in  the  Gospel 
according  to  the  Egyptians  t  Besides  this  Gospel  according 
to  the  Egyptians,  he  was  acquainted  with  other  apocryphal 
writings — a  Gospel  according  to  the  Hebrews,  Traditions  of 
Matthias,  and  others  ;  but  the  passage  I  have  just  cited  is  evi 
dence  enough  that,  in  his  estimation,  no  other  account  of  the 
Saviour's  deeds  or  words  stood  on  the  level  of  the  four  Gospels. 


*  Clement,  possibly  a  Greek  by  birth,  was  born  about  the  middle  of  the 
second  century,  and  was  head  of  the  Catechetical  School  in  Alexandria 
(192-202).  We  last  hear  of  him  as  alive  in  211  (Euseb.  H.  E.  vi.  n). 

t  Some  have  doubted  whether  Clement  had  himself  seen  the  Gospel  ac 
cording  to  the  Egyptians.  He  had  said  a  little  before  that  '  he  thought ' 
(ol/xcu)  that  the  passage  under  discussion  was  to  be  found  in  the  Gospel 
according  to  the  Egyptians.  It  has  been  inferred,  therefore,  that  this  was 
either  a  book  which  he  only  knew  by  hearsay,  or  else  one  which  it  was  so 
long  since  he  had  looked  into,  that  he  did  not  quite  like  to  trust  his 
memory  in  speaking  of  it. 


42  THE    GOSPELS   IN   THE    EARLY   CHURCH.  [iV. 

When  we  compare  the  quotations  of  Clement  and  Irenseus 
a  new  phenomenon  presents  itself,  which  throws  back  the 
date  of  the  Gospels  still  further  behind  their  own  times.  We 
become  aware  of  the  existence  of  various  readings.  In  fact, 
in  some  of  the  texts,  where  the  reading  is  now  controverted, 
there  are  second  century  witnesses  on  opposite  sides.  And 
the  general  type  of  the  text  in  use  in  Alexandria  was  different 
from  that  in  use  in  the  West.  Thus  you  see  that  the  Gospels 
were  not  only  in  existence  at  the  end  of  the  second  century, 
but  they  had  by  that  time  been  copied  and  re-copied  so  often, 
that  errors  from  transcription  and  otherwise  had  time  to  creep 
in,  and  different  families  of  text  to  establish  themselves. 

The  third  witness  to  whom  I  have  appealed,  Tertullian,** 
also  lived  at  the  end  of  the  second  century,  but  represents  a 
different  section  of  the  Church,  the  Latin-speaking  section. 
Nothing  need  be  said  as  to  his  use  of  the  Gospels,  about 
which  there  is  as  little  question  as  to  my  own  use  of 
them,  but  it  is  worth  while  to  call  attention  to  the  evidence 
his  writings  afford,  that  in  his  time  they  had  already  been 
translated  into  Latin.  In  fact  he  finds  fault  with  the  current 
Latin  rendering  of  the  first  verse  of  St.  John's  Gospel,  in 
which  the  word  '  Logos '  was  translated  by  '  Sermo.'f  Ter- 
tullian  would  have  preferred  '  Ratio.'  I  may  say  in  passing  that 
the  difficulty  here  found  by  Tertullian — that  of  adequately 
rendering  the  Greek  word  'Logos' — has  been  experienced 
by  every  translator  of  the  New  Testament.  For  '  Logos  '  not 
only  means  the  spoken  word — the  only  sense  suggested  by 
our  English  version — but  still  more,  as  Tertullian  renders  it, 
reason.  And  so  the  early  Greek  Fathers  give  the  double 
sense  to  the  term  in  the  Prologue  of  St.  John,  inferring  that 

*  The  data  for  fixing  the  chronology  of  Tertullian's  writings  are  scanty; 
but  we  shall  not  be  far  wrong  in  counting  that  he  first  appeared  as  a 
Church  writer  about  197,  and  that  his  literary  activity  continued  some 
thirty  years  longer.  His  New  Testament  quotations  have  been  collected 
by  Ronsch,  Das  neue  Testament  Tertullian ' s.  The  quotations  from  the 
Gospels  occupy  over  200  pages,  and  if  the  Greek  Gospels  had  not  come 
down  to  us,  we  could  from  this  source  alone  obtain  a  knowledge  of  far  the 
greater  portion  of  their  contents. 

t  'Jam  in  usu  est  nostrorum,  per  simplicitatem  interpretationis  Sermo- 
nem  dicere  in  primordio  apud  deum  fuisse  cum  magis  rationem  competat 
antiquiorem  haberi.'  Adv.Prax.  c.  5.  Yet  Tertullian  himself  habitually 


IV.]  TERTULLIAN.  43 

it  designates  the  Second  Person  of  the  Trinity  not  only  as 
God's  spoken  Word,  by  which  He  made  known  His  will  to 
men,  but  also  as  having  before  this  utterance  dwelt  from  eter 
nity  with  the  Father  ;  some  analogy  to  help  us  to  conceive 
such  an  indwelling  being  found  in  the  dwelling  in  man  of  the 
principle  of  reason.  So  it  is  that  the  Fathers  almost  unani 
mously  interpret  the  description  of  Wisdom  in  the  8th  of  Pro 
verbs,  of  the  Second  Person  of  the  Trinity,  whom  the  Collect 
in  daily  use  in  our  own  College  Chapel  describes  as  '  the 
Eternal  Wisdom  of  the  Father.'  This  interpretation  was 
received  by  the  Arians  as  well  as  the  orthodox. 

Now  this  fact,  that  Tertullian  criticized  renderings  which 
nevertheless  he  adopts  in  his  own  quotations,  throws  back 
the  range  of  his  testimony.  We  must  allow  some  consider 
able  time  for  a  version  to  acquire  such  currency  as  to  mould 
the  popular  theological  dialect,  and  to  give  authority  to 
renderings  which  were  in  the  judgment  of  good  scholars 
capable  of  improvement.  Towards  the  end  of  the  second 
century  it  is  not  only  the  fact  that  our  Gospels  are  in  sole 
possession  all  over  the  Christian  world,  but  translations  of 
them  have  gained  an  established  rank.  That  is  to  say,  at  the 
time  when  it  is  doubted  if  our  Gospels  were  born,  we  find 
their  children  in  vigorous  life.* 

I  believe,  then,  that  if  anyone  fairly  weighs  all  that  is  in 
volved  in  the  undisputed  fact  that  Irenseus,  Clement,  and 
Tertullian  show  that  at  the  end  of  the  second  century  all  the 
principal  books  of  our  New  Testament  were  received  all  over 
the  civilized  world  as  the  works  of  the  authors  to  whom  we 
still  ascribe  them,  he  will  own  it  to  be  unreasonable  to  demand 

uses  '  Sermo '  as  the  equivalent  for  '  Logos,'  and  even  in  the  same  treatise 
(c.  20)  when  he  formally  quotes  John  i.  I,  he  does  so  in  the  form  :  'In 
principio  erat  sermo  et  sermo  erat  apud  deum  et  deus  erat  sermo.  Hie 
erat  in  principio  apud  deum.'  Another  passage  in  which  Tertullian 
appeals  from  the  current  Latin  translation  to  the  Greek  original  is  (De 
Monog.  c.  ii.):  '  Sciamus  plane  non  sic  esse  in  Grasco  authentico,  quo- 
modo  in  usum  exiit  per  duarum  syllabarum  aut  callidam  aut  simplicem 
eversionem ;  Si  autem  dormierit  "vir  ejus,  quasi  de  future  sonet,  ac  per 
hoc  videatur  ad  earn  pertinere  quse  jam  in  fide  virum  amiserit.'  But  here 
again  it  is  to  be  noted  that  Tertullian,  when  quoting  the  passage  himself, 
conforms  to  common  usage  and  does  not  introduce  the  correction  which 
he  suggests. 

*  See  note  at  end  of  Lecture  (p  44). 


44  THE   GOSPELS   IN   THE   EARLY   CHURCH.  [iV. 

further  evidence,  when  we  do  not  dream  of  requiring  such 
evidence  in  the  case  of  any  secular  work. 

The  remains  of  the  first  generation  of  Christians  are  scanty, 
and  of  the  few  works  that  have  come  down  to  us,  several  are 
apologies  intended  for  heathen  readers,*  to  whom  it  would 
not  be  appropriate  to  cite  the  New  Testament  Scriptures. 
There  is  an  advantage  then  in  commencing  with  that  age  of 
which  we  have  remains  so  full  and  abundant  as  to  leave  no 
room  for  controversy  as  to  the  sentiments  of  the  writers  ;  and 
which  at  the  same  time  is  so  near  the  age  of  the  Apostles, 
that  what  was  then  the  undisputed  established  opinion  as  to 
the  authorship  of  their  sacred  books,  held  by  common  consent 
of  distant  Churches,  is  very  likely  to  be  a  true  opinion. 
Should  a  question  arise  some  centuries  hence  whether  Pope 
wrote  the  'Dunciad'  and  the  '  Rape  of  the  Lock,'  or  whether 
Goldsmith  wrote  the  *  Deserted  Village  '  and  the  '  Vicar  of 
Wakefield,'  it  would  go  far  to  settle  the  question,  if  it  were 
proved  that  in  our  generation  no  doubt  was  entertained  by 
anyone  on  the  matter,  even  if  all  preceding  testimony  had 
perished. 

Though,  in  my  opinion,  the  testimony  of  the  three  witnesses 
already  considered  might  suffice  to  produce  conviction,  we 
can  produce  trustworthy  evidence  of  considerably  earlier  date, 
which  will  be  the  subject  of  future  Lectures. 


N  o  TE. 

Scholars  had  generally  agreed  in  inferring  from  the  evidence 
here  appealed  to  that  there  existed  in  the  time  of  Tertullian 
a  Latin  translation  that  was  in  general  use  in  Africa.  This 
inference  has  been  lately  contested  by  Zahn  Geschichte  des  N. 
T.  Kanons,  1888,  I.  35,  sq.  He  admits  that  the  reading  of  the 
Gospels  then  formed  part  of  the  service  at  Christian  meetings 


*  From  the  nature  of  the  case,  references  to  the  New  Testament  books 
are  infrequent  in  works  addressed  to  such  readers ;  for  example,  if  only 
Tertullian's  'Apology'  had  come  down  to  us  it  would  not  have  been 
possible  to  prove  that  he  was  acquainted  with  the  Gospels. 


IV.]  THE   LATIN   TRANSLATION.  45 

for  worship ;  but  he  contends  that  this  did  not  necessitate  a 
Latin  Bible.  Irenaeus  preached  to  the  Celts  of  Gaul,  but  we 
do  not  hear  of  a  Celtic  Bible.  We  do  not  hear  of  any  Punic 
Bible  in  Africa,  though  Christianity  made  many  converts 
among  those  who  spoke  no  other  language.  He  points  out 
that  in  the  Jewish  Synagogues  the  Bible  was  read  in  Hebrew, 
and  then  orally  interpreted  to  those  who  did  not  understand 
the  ancient  language,  and  he  cites  two  or  three  examples  of  a 
similar  use  of  interpreters  in  the  Christian  Church.  In  his 
opinion  then  the  needs  of  those  who  spoke  no  other  language 
than  Latin  were  at  first  met,  not  by  any  authorized  Latin 
version  of  Scripture,  but  by  independent  oral  interpretation 
at  the  Christian  meetings.  It  may  readily  be  conceded  that, 
as  has  been  often  remarked,  the  Gospel  was  introduced  into 
Rome  in  the  colony  of  Jews  or  other  foreign  settlers  whose 
ordinary  language  was  Greek,  whom  Paul  addressed  in  Greek 
in  the  Epistle  to  the  Romans,  for  whose  use,  according  to 
early  tradition,  the  Greek  Gospel  of  St.  Mark  was  written, 
and  whose  liturgical  service  no  doubt  was  Greek.  Nor  would 
such  a  service  be  unintelligible  when  converts  were  made 
among  native  Romans  of  higher  rank  ;  for  a  knowledge  of 
Greek  was  the  ordinary  accomplishment  of  a  Roman  gentle 
man.  This  was  equally  true  of  Africa,  as  Zahn  illustrates 
from  the  martyrdom  of  Perpetua,  a  document  not  much  later 
than  the  year  200.  Perpetua  was  a  lady  of  good  position, 
'honeste  nata,  liberaliter  instituta,  matronaliter  nupta.'  When 
converts  of  lower  rank  came  in,  it  is  extremely  credible  that 
the  transition  from  liturgical  service  in  Greek  to  liturgical 
service  in  Latin  was  bridged  over  by  liturgical  service  in 
Greek  accompanied  by  Latin  oral  interpretation.  The  only 
question  is  at  what  epoch  the  transition  took  place,  and  Zahn 
gives  no  sufficient  evidence  that  a  Latin  service  had  not  been 
fully  established  in  the  time  of  Tertullian.  He  himself  admits 
that  the  context  indicates  that  the  '  agios,  agios,  agios,'  in  the 
martyrdom  of  Perpetua  was  derived  directly  from  the  Book  of 
Revelation  rather  than  from  liturgical  use  ;  but  in  any  case  it 
is  quite  conceivable  that  an  African  Latin  Liturgy  might  retain 
these  words  in  the  original.  At  any  rate,  though  the  method 
of  interpretation  would  enable  persons  ignorant  of  Greek  to 


46  THE    GOSPELS   IN    THE    EARLY   CHURCH.  [iV. 

join  intelligently  in  a  Greek  service,  it  presupposes  clergy 
able  to  interpret.  Now,  though  the  clergy  who  at  the  end  of 
the  second  century  ministered  to  Celtic  or  Punic  congregations 
are  likely  to  have  known  enough  either  of  Greek  or  Latin  to 
enable  them  to  interpret,  it  is  not  likely  that  Greek  alone 
would  have  sufficed,  or  that  those  who  ministered  to  rural 
congregations  in  Africa  would  all  be  such  good  Greek  scholars 
as  to  be  able  to  dispense  with  a  Latin  Bible.  Another  weak 
point  in  Zahn's  comparison  is  that  Celtic  was  not  a  literary 
language,  and  the  rude  people  who  spoke  it  might  easily  be 
content  with  such  portions  of  Scripture  as  they  could  hear 
read  in  Church  ;  but  among  Latin-speaking  Christians  there 
would  be  many  of  such  literary  cultivation  as  to  wish  to  read  as 
well  as  hear  the  Scripture. 

A  much  stronger  point  in  Zahn's  case  is  that  Tertullian 
himself  repeatedly  quotes  directly  from  the  Greek,  and  not 
from  a  Latin  version,  as  we  can  tell  from  his  translating  the 
same  passage  in  different  ways.  This  has  been  noticed 
before:  see  for  example  Hort  (N.  T.,  ii.  78).  Tertullian  was 
a  good  Greek  scholar,  who  could  not  only  read  that  language, 
but  had  even  written  some  tracts  in  it.  It  is  to  be  noted  that 
far  the  larger  part  of  instances  of  his  direct  use  of  the  Greek 
Testament  occur  in  his  work  against  Marcion.  Now  Ter 
tullian  must  have  written  that  work  with  his  Greek  Testament 
open  before  him,  for  Tertullian's  object  was  to  maintain  the 
true  text  of  New  Testament  passages  which  Marcion  had 
falsified  or  omitted  ;  and  as  Marcion's  work  was  certainly  in 
Greek,  it  must  have  been  with  the  Greek  original  that  he 
compared  it.  Tertullian's  other  citations  require  careful 
examination,  but  I  may  remark  that  Zahn  is  willing  (p.  58) 
to  make  an  admission  fatal  to  his  case  in  conceding  that 
Tertullian  was  acquainted  with  the  Latin  translation  of 
Irenaeus.  The  proofs  of  this  offered  by  Massuet  in  the 
prolegomena  to  his  edition  of  Irenaeus  have  been  accepted 
by  many  scholars  as  sufficient,  but  certainly  need  further  sift 
ing.  But  we  may  dismiss  as  quite  incredible  Zahn's  idea  (p.  58) 
that  Latin-speaking  Christians  demanded  a  translation  of  the 
work  of  Irenaeus,  and  of  other  pieces  of  Greek  literature,  before 
they  cared  to  have  a  translation  of  their  Greek  Bible.  If  the 


V.]  MURATORIAN    FRAGMENT.  47 

resemblances  between  Tertullian  and  the  Latin  translation  of 
Irenaeus  are  enough  to  prove  that  Tertullian  was  acquainted 
with  this  translation,  the  differences  are  certainly  enough  to 
prove  that,  notwithstanding,  he  constantly  preferred,  instead 
of  using  it,  to  translate  for  himself.  However,  the  question 
is  not  whether  Tertullian  himself  used  a  Latin  translation  of 
the  Bible — a  thing  which  we  readily  grant  he  had  no  need  to 
do — but  whether  he  bears  testimony  to  the  existence  of  such 
a  thing  in  his  time.  Now  it  seems  to  me  that  the  practice  of 
a  number  of  independent  interpreters,  each  in  his  own  Church, 
could  never  have  sufficed  to  establish  such  a  '  use '  as  that 
which  is  attested  in  the  passages  already  cited.  If  Tertullian 
or  anyone  else  did  not  like  the  interpretation  given  by  his 
neighbours,  he  would  have  felt  himself  perfectly  free  to  give 
a  better  one  of  his  own.  I  am,  therefore,  not  prepared  to 
abandon  the  hitherto  received  opinion  that  in  the  time  of 
Tertullian  a  Latin  translation  existed  in  writing.  Put  the 
matter,  however,  at  the  lowest,  and  it  is  certain  that  in  his 
time  the  Latin  translation,  whether  known  orally  through  the 
work  of  different  interpreters  or  by  writing,  had  assumed  a 
definite  form,  so  as  to  constitute  an  established  use.  So  that 
my  assertion  remains  true,  that  in  the  time  of  Tertullian  not 
only  the  Gospels  existed  but  their  children,  the  only  dispu 
table  point  being  whether  or  not  the  latter  had  attained  their 
full  growth. 


v. 
PART   II. 

MURATORIAN    FRAGMENT.       CAIUS — HIPPOLYTUS. 

It  would  take  more  time  than  I  can  ask  you  to  give,  if  I 
were  to  bring  before  you  all  the  second  century  testimonies  to 
the  Gospels  ;  and  I  had  intended  to  go  back  at  once  from  the 
three  witnesses  whose  testimony  is  admitted  by  Strauss  to 
Justin  Martyr,  who  lived  about  the  middle  of  the  second  cen 
tury  ;  but  I  see  that  to  do  this  would  oblige  me  to  omit  some 


48  THE    GOSPELS    IN    THE    EARLY   CHURCH.  [v. 

things  of  which  I  think  you  ought  to  be  told,  and  with  which 
I  mean  to  occupy  the  present  Lecture.  I  call  your  attention, 
in  the  first  place,  to  a  very  interesting  document,  commonly 
known  as  the  Muratorian  Fragment  on  the  Canon.  It  is  a 
list  of  the  books  accepted  at  its  date  as  authoritative,  and  it  is 
called  Muratorian,  because  first  published,  in  the  year  1740, 
by  the  Italian  scholar  Muratori,  from  a  manuscript  now,  as 
then,  in  the  Ambrosian  Library  at  Milan,  but  which  had  origi 
nally  belonged  to  the  great  Irish  monastery  of  Bobbio.  This 
manuscript  is  a  collection  of  extracts  from  various  authors, 
made  about  the  eighth  century,  and  the  particular  extract 
with  which  we  have  now  to  deal  must  have  been  made  from 
what  was  then  a  mutilated  manuscript,  which  the  transcriber 
was  desirous  to  preserve ;  for  the  existing  manuscript  is  quite 
perfect — no  leaves  are  lost ;  but  the  extract  begins  in  the 
middle  of  a  sentence,  and  ends  quite  as  abruptly.  It  bears 
marks  of  having  been  a  rude  translation  from  the  Greek  ;  and 
the  transcriber  was  clearly  a  very  indifferent  Latin  scholar, 
for  his  work  is  full  of  misspellings  and  other  blunders,  such 
as  in  some  places  quite  to  obscure  the  meaning.  In  fact,  it 
was  as  a  specimen  of  such  blundering  that  Muratori  first 
published  it. 

So  much  interest  attaches  to  this  extract,  as  containing  the 
earliest  extant  attempt  to  give  anything  like  a  formal  list  of 
New  Testament  books,  that  I  must  not  grudge  the  time  ne 
cessary  for  laying  before  you  the  internal  evidence  which 
approximately  fixes  the  date  of  the  composition  of  the  work 
from  which  the  extract  was  taken.*  In  reading  Paley's  '  Evi- 

*  A  monograph  on  the  Muratorian  Fragment  was  published  by  Tregelles 
in  1867.  Considerable  additional  light  was  thrown  on  it  by  Dr.  Westcott, 
the  results  of  whose  study  of  it  are  given  in  the  appendix  to  his  New 
Testament  Canon,  p.  514.  As  I  have  frequently  occasion  to  refer  to  this 
Fragment,  it  is  convenient  to  print  it  here  entire,  as  restored  by  Westcott ; 
but  it  will  be  observed  that  some  passages  are  too  corrupt  to  be  restored 
with  certainty.  For  a  transcript  of  the  actual  text  I  refer  to  Westcott's 
New  Testament  Canon,  and  for  other  sources  of  information  to  my 
article,  MURATORIAN  FRAGMENT,  in  Smith's  'Dictionary  of  Christian 
Biography. ' 

.  .  .  quibus  tamen  interfuit,  et  ita  posuit.  Tertium  Evangelii  librum 
secundum  Lucan,  Lucas  iste  medicus  post  ascensum  Christi,  cum  eum 
Paulus  quasi  ut  juris  studiosum  secundum  adsumsisset,  nomine  suo  ex 
opinione  conscripsit.  Dominum  tamen  nee  ipse  vidit  in  carne,  et  idem 


V.]  MUR.ATORIAN   FRAGMENT.  49 

dences '  last  year  you  must  have  become  familiar  at  least  with 
the  name  of  the  '  Shepherd  of  Hermas.'  This  work  is  quoted 
as  inspired  by  Irenaeus  and  Clement  of  Alexandria ;  and  in 
the  third  century  Origen  hazarded  the  conjecture  that  it 
might  have  been  written  by  Hermas,  who  is  mentioned  in  the 
Epistle  to  the  Romans  ;  and  this,  though,  as  I  say,  a  compara 
tively  late  conjecture,  has  been  accepted  by  some  as  if  it  were 
tradition.  The  Muratorian  Fragment  gives  a  different  account 
of  the  authorship,  and  one  which  has  all  the  air  of  being  tra 
dition,  and  not  conjecture.  It  would  appear  that,  at  the  time 
this  fragment  was  written,  there  was  some  disposition  to 
accept  the  '  Shepherd '  as  canonical ;  for,  in  a  passage  where, 
notwithstanding  corruption  of  text,  the  writer's  general  mean 
ing  can  be  clearly  made  out,  he  lays  down  that  this  book  may 
be  read,  but  not  be  publicly  used,  with  the  Apostles  and 
Prophets,  whose  number  is  complete,  seeing  that  it  was 
written  '  very  recently  in  our  own  time  by  Hermas,  while  his 
brother  Pius  sat  in  the  chair  of  the  See  of  Rome.'  Now,  the 
date  when  Pius  was  Bishop  of  Rome  is  variously  given  ;  those 
who  place  him  latest  make  him  bishop  between  142-157  ;  so 
the  question  as  to  the  date  of  the  fragment  is,  How  long  after 

prout  assequi  potuit,  ita  et  a  nativitate  Johannis  incepit  dicere.  Quarti 
evangeliorum  Johannes  ex  discipulis.  Cohortantibus  condiscipulis  et 
episcopis  suis  dixit,  conjejunate  mihi  hodie  triduum  et  quid  cuique  fuerit 
revelatum  alterutrum  nobis  enarremus.  Eadem  nocte  revelatum  Andrese 
ex  apostolis,  ut  recognoscentibus  cunctis  Johannes  suo  nomine  cuncta 
describeret.  Et  ideo  licet  varia  singulis  Evangeliorum  libris  principia 
doceantur,  nihil  tamen  differt  credentium  fidei,  cum  uno  ac  principal! 
Spiritu  declarata  sint  in  omnibus  omnia  de  nativitate,  de  passione,  de 
resurrectione,  de  conversatione  cum  discipulis  suis  ac  de  gemino  ejus  ad- 
vento,  primum  in  humilitate  despectus,  quod  fuit,  secundum  potestate 
regali  prseclarum,  quod  futurum  est.  Quid  ergo  minim  si  Johannes  tarn 
constanter  singula  etiam  in  epistulis  suis  proferat  dicens  in  semetipsum, 
•  Quae  vidimus  oculis  nostris  et  auribus  audivimus  et  manus  nostrae  pal- 
paverunt,  hsec  scripsimus.'  Sic  enim  non  solum  visorem,  sed  et  auditorem, 
sed  et  scriptorem  omnium  mirabilium  domini  per  ordinem  profitetur. 

Acta  autem  omnium  apostolorum  sub  uno  libro  scripta  sunt.  Lucas 
optime  Theophilo  comprendit,  quia  sub  prsesentia  ejus  singula  gerebantur, 
sicuti  et  semote  passionem  Petri  evidenter  declarat,  sed  et  profectionem 
Pauli  ab  urbe  ad  Spaniam  proficiscentis. 

Epistulae  autem  Pauli,  quia,  a  quo  loco,  vel  qua  ex  causa  directs  sint, 
volentibus  intellegere  ipsse  declarant.  Primum  omnium  Corinthiis  schisma 
hseresis  interdicens,  deinceps  Galatis  circumcisionem,  Romanis  autem 
ordine  scripturarum,  sed  et  principium  earum  esse  Christum  intimans, 
prolixius  scripsit ;  de  quibus  singulis  necesse  est  a  nobis  disputari,  cum 

E 


50  THE    GOSPELS   IN    THE    EARLY   CHURCH.  [v. 

could  a  writer  fairly  describe  this  period  as  '  nuperrime  tem- 
poribus  nostris  '  ?  It  is  urged  that  we  cannot  well  make  this 
interval  much  more  than  twenty  years.  I  have  been  accus 
tomed  to  speak  of  the  definition  of  the  dogma  of  Papal  In 
fallibility  at  the  Vatican  Council  of  1870  as  very  recent,  and 
as  an  event  of  our  own  time,  though  I  begin  to  doubt  whether 
I  can  go  on  much  longer  with  propriety  in  using  such 
language ;  but  though  the  definition  of  the  dogma  of  the 
Immaculate  Conception  in  1852  is  also  an  event  of  my  own 
time,  you  would  think  it  strange  if  I  called  it  very  recent, 
seeing  that  it  occurred  before  most  of  you  were  born.  It  is 
concluded,  therefore,  that  the  date  of  this  fragment  cannot  be 
much  later  than  170. 

There  is,  however,  great  difficulty  in  finding  any  writer  of 
that  date  to  whom  it  can  be  plausibly  assigned,  especially  as 
internal  evidence  limits  us  to  Rome  or  Italy  as  the  place  of 
composition.  This  consideration  sets  aside  a  very  improb 
able  guess  of  the  late  Baron  Bunsen — Hegesippus,  commonly 
called,  but  probably  incorrectly,  the  earliest  ecclesiastical 
historian.  The  extracts  from  his  work  which  have  been  pre 
served  by  Eusebius,  and  by  which  alone  he  is  now  known, 

ipse  beatus  Apostolus  Paulus,  sequens  prodecessoris  sui  Johannis  ordinem 
nonnisi  nominatim  septem  ecclesiis  scribat  ordine  tali ;  ad  Corinthios 
(prima),  ad  Ephesios  (secunda),  ad  Philippenses  (tertia),  ad  Colossenses 
(quarta),  ad  Galatas  (quinta),  ad  Thessalonicenses  (sexta),  ad  Romanos 
(septima).  Verum  Corinthiis  et  Thessalonicensibus  licet  pro  correptione 
iteretur,  una  tamen  per  omnem  orbem  terrae  ecclesia  diffusa  esse  dinoscitur; 
et  Johannes  enim  in  Apocalypsi,  licet  septem  ecclesiis  scribat,  tamen 
omnibus  dicit.  Verum  ad  Philemonem  unam,  et  ad  Titum  unam,  et  ad 
Timotheum  duas,  pro  affectu  et  dilectione;  in  honore  tamen  ecclesise 
catholicae  in  ordinatione  ecclesiasticae  disciplinae  sanctificatae  sunt.  Fertur 
etiam  ad  Laodicenses,  alia  ad  Alexandrinos,  Pauli  nomine  finctse  ad 
haeresim  Marcionis,  et  alia  plura,  quas  in  catholicam  ecclesiam  recipi  non 
potest :  fel  enim  cum  melle  misceri  non  congruit. 

Epistula  sane  Judae  et  superscript  Johannis  duas  in  Catholica  habentur ; 
et  Sapientia  ab  amicis  Salomonis  in  honorem  ipsius  scripta. 

Apocalypses  etiam  Johannis  et  Petri  tantum  recipimus,  quam  quidam 
ex  nostris  legi  in  ecclesia  nolunt.  Pastorem  vero  nuperrime  temporibus 
nostris  in  urbe  Roma  Hermas  conscripsit,  sedente  cathedra  urbis  Romae 
Ecclesiae  Pio  Episcopo  fratre  ejus ;  et  ideo  legi  eum  quidem  oportet,  se 
publicare  vero  in  Ecclesia  populo,  neque  inter  prophetas,  completum 
numero,  neque  inter  apostolos  in  finem  temporum  potest. 

Arsinoi  autem  seu  Valentini  vel  Metiad  [  ]  nihil  in  totum  recipimus. 
Qui  etiam  novum  psalmorum  librum  Marcioni  conscripserunt,  una  cum 
Basilide,  Assiano  Cataphrygum  constitutorem  .  .  . 


V.J  MURATORIAN    FRAGMENT.  51 

though  historical  in  their  character,  are  thought  by  the  best 
recent  critics  more  likely  to  have  been  taken  from  a  doctrinal 
or  controversial  book  than  from  a  regular  history.  Hege- 
sippus  lived  about  the  right  time,  but  he  had  no  connexion 
with  Italy :  and  besides,  since  Eusebius  tells  us  that  in  the 
passages  he  cites  from  earlier  writers  he  had  particularly  in 
view  to  illustrate  the  testimony  borne  by  them  to  the  New 
Testament  Scriptures  (H.  E.,  iii.  3),  I  count  it  improbable 
that,  if  Eusebius  had  found  in  Hegesippus  so  remarkable  an 
enumeration  of  books  owned  as  canonical,  he  would  not  have 
made  some  mention  of  it.  Muratori  himself,  when  he  pub 
lished  the  fragment,  conjectured  as  its  author  Caius,  the 
Roman  presbyter  ;  and  there  is  vastly  more  to  be  said  for  that 
guess  than  for  Bunsen's.  Caius  was  the  author  of  a  dialogue 
against  the  Montanists.  The  dialogue  has  been  lost,  but, 
Eusebius  (H.  E.,  vi.  20)  tells  us  that,  in  rebuking  the  rashness 
and  impudence  of  the  Montanists  in  composing  new  Scrip 
tures,  he  counts  only  thirteen  Epistles  of  St.  Paul,  omitting 
that  to  the  Hebrews.  Thus  it  seems  certain  that  this  lost ' 
dialogue  contained  a  list  of  canonical  books,  which  Caius  set 
down,  intending  by  this  closed  Canon  to  exclude  Montanist 
additions.  It  is  natural  to  ask,  then,  May  not  this  Muratorian 
list  be  the  very  list  of  Caius  ?  Like  that,  it  was  drawn  up  at 
Rome ;  and  like  that  also,  it  only  counts  thirteen  Epistles  of 
St.  Paul,  leaving  out  the  Epistle  to  the  Hebrews.  But  the 
date  has  been  thought  a  fatal  objection.  Caius  wrote  in  the 
episcopate  of  Zephyrinus — we  may  say  about  the  year  210; 
how,  then,  could  he  speak  of  the  year  140  or  150  as  very 
recent  ?  The  objection  is  a  serious,  but  I  do  not  count  it  a 
fatal  one.  When  a  writer  is  only  known  to  us  by  a  single 
fragment,  we  have  no  means  of  judging  of  his  habitual  care 
fulness  in  the  use  of  language,  and  so  we  are  not  safe  in 
considering  ourselves  bound  to  put  the  strictest  interpretation 
on  his  words.  Instances  have  been  produced  where  similar 
expressions  have  been  used  about  events  which  happened  a 
century  or  two  ago.  Everything  is  comparative.  We  should 
call  Luther  and  Calvin  quite  modern  writers  if  anyone  im 
agined  them  to  be  contemporary  with  St.  Augustine. 
Although,  as  I  said  just  now,  I  should  not  dream,  in  ordinary 

E  2 


52  THE   GOSPELS   IN   THE    EARLY   CHURCH.  [v. 

conversation,  of  describing  an  event  of  the  year  1852  as  quite 
recent ;  yet,  if  I  were  writing  controversially,  and  contrasting 
the  doctrine  of  the  Immaculate  Conception  with  the  articles 
of  the  Apostles'  Creed,  it  would  not  be  in  the  least  unnatural 
if  I  described  the  former  as  a  dogma  formulated  '  quite  re 
cently  and  in  our  own  time.'  And  I  might  say  this  even  if 
the  promulgation  of  the  doctrine  had  been  fifty  years  earlier 
than  it  was.  Why,  even  Pope  Pius's  Creed,  which  was  made 
some  three  hundred  years  ago,  is  often  spoken  of  as  quite  new 
when  it  is  put  in  comparison  with  the  Nicene  Creed.  Now, 
the  object  of  Caius  (as  described  by  Eusebius)  and  of  the 
author  of  the  fragment  clearly  was  controversial ;  it  was  to 
draw  a  broad  line  of  separation  between  the  inspired  writings 
of  the  Apostolic  age  and  modern  additions  ;  and,  therefore, 
we  need  not  press  too  closely  the  energetic  language  with 
which  the  author  of  the  fragment  protests  against  placing  on 
a  level  in  Church  reading  with  the  Sacred  Scriptures  a  writing 
that  he  believed  to  be  no  older  than  Pope  Pius  I. 

Now  a  careful  examination  of  the  *  Shepherd  of  Hermas ' 
has  quite  convinced  me  that,  instead  of  being  a  work  of  the 
middle  of  the  second  century,  it  dates  from  its  very  beginning. 
If  the  Muratorian  writer  has  made  a  mistake  about  the  date 
of  Hermas,  it  is  likely  he  was  not  so  near  a  contemporary  of 
Pius  as  people  have  thought.  I  have  also  found  reason,  on 
investigating  the  history  of  Montanism,  which  clearly  is  com 
bated  in  the  Muratorian  fragment,  to  think  that  it  did  not 
make  its  appearance  in  the  West  until  a  little  after  the  year 
200.  On  these  and  other  grounds*  I  came  to  the  conclusion 
that  the  fragment  is  of  the  same  age  as  the  dialogue  of  Caius  ; 
and,  then,  I  did  not  think  I  could  fairly  refuse  to  accept 
Muratori's  hypothesis,  although  I  had  myself  proposed  to  as 
cribe  the  fragment  to  Caius's  contemporary  Hippolytus,  being 
led  to  that  idea  by  finding  the  same  note  about  the  authorship 
of  the  '  Shepherd '  in  an  early  list  of  Roman  bishops  which  I 
believe  to  be  derived  from  Hippolytus.f  Further,  the  whole 
tone  of  the  fragment  is  rather  didactic  than  controversial — 

*  See  Smith's   'Dictionary  of  Christian  Biography,'   ARTS,  MURA 
TORIAN  FRAGMENT  and  MONTANISM. 
t  Hermathena,   I.  125  (1874). 


V.]  MURATORIAN    FRAGMENT.  53 

rather  the  lesson  of  a  master  to  disciples  than  of  a  disputant 
with  opponents,  so  that  it  scarcely  seemed  likely  to  have  come 
from  the  dialogue  against  the  Montanists.  But  though  I  ac 
cepted  the  Caius  hypothesis  for  a  time,  a  new  difficulty  has 
since  arisen.  Very  little  had  been  known  of  Caius,  but  Dr. 
Gwynn  has  lately  (Hermathena,  1888),  recovered  some  frag 
ments  of  his  writings  which  leave  no  doubt  that  Caius  rejected 
the  Apocalypse  of  St.  John,  a  work  accepted  in  the  Muratorian 
fragment.  I  return,  therefore,  to  my  former  opinion  that 
Hippolytus  was  probably  the  author  of  the  work  of  which  this  ' 
fragment  formed  a  part. 

I  have  frankly  told  you  my  own  opinion,  but  you  must 
remember  this  is  only  my  individual  notion,  and  that  the  re 
ceived  doctrine  of  scholars  (orthodox  and  sceptical  alike)  is 
that  the  document  is  not  later  than  170  or  180.  It  is  a  pity 
that  the  impossibility  of  laying  before  you  any  view  but  that 
which,  however  mistakenly,  I  believe  to  be  true,  obliges  me 
both  to  be  guilty  of  the  immodesty  of  setting  myself  in  oppo 
sition  to  the  received  opinion  of  scholars,  and  also  to  forego 
the  controversial  advantage  that  arises  from  accepting  the 
date  commonly  ascribed  to  the  fragment.  According  to  that 
date  we  gain  a  witness  to  our  Canon,  who,  if  not  many  years 
earlier  than  Irenaeus,  would  be  at  least  an  elder  contemporary: 
according  to  my  view,  he  is  but  a  younger  contemporary  (for 
both  Caius  and  Hippolytus*  are  said  to  have  been  disciples  of 
Irenaeus),  and  the  main  value  of  the  fragment  is  the  testimony 
it  gives  to  the  wide  line  of  distinction  that  at  that  early  date 
was  drawn  between  canonical  books  and  the  most  valued  of 
uninspired  writings.  I  shall  frequently  have  occasion  to  refer 
to  this  document  in  the  course  of  these  Lectures.  At  present 
I  will  merely  report  the  account  it  gives  of  the  Gospels. 

The  fragment  begins  with  a  few  words  which  evidently 
are  the  end  of  a  description  of  St.  Mark's  Gospel,  for  it  pro 
ceeds  to  describe  what  it  calls  the  third  book  of  the  Gospels, 
that  by  Luke,  whom  it  states  to  have  been  a  companion  of 
Paul,  but  not  to  have  himself  seen  our  Lord  in  the  flesh, 

*  These  writers  were  both  leading  members  of  the  Church  of  Rome  in 
the  first  quarter  of  the  third  century.  It  is  likely  that  each  may  have  com 
menced  his  literary  activity  before  the  end  of  the  second. 


54  THE    GOSPELS   OF   THE    EARLY   CHURCH.  [v. 

mention  being  made  that  he  commenced  his  history  from 
the  nativity  of  John  the  Baptist.  The  fourth  Gospel  it  states 
to  have  been  written  by  St.  John  on  the  suggestion  of  his 
fellow-disciples  and  bishops  (by  which,  I  suppose,  is  meant 
the  other  Apostles),  whereupon  John  proposed  that  they 
should  all  fast  three  days,  and  tell  each  other  whatever 
might  be  revealed  to  any,  and  it  was  the  same  night  revealed 
to  Andrew  that,  under  the  revision  of  all,  John  should 
in  his  own  name  write  an  account  of  everything.  Wherefore, 
it  adds,  although  the  teaching  of  the  separate  books  be  diver 
sified,  it  makes  no  difference  to  the  faith  of  believers,  since  in 
all,  by  one  guiding  Spirit,  are  declared  all  things  concerning 
our  Lord's  Nativity,  Passion,  Resurrection,  conversation  with 
His  disciples,  and  concerning  His  double  Advent — the  first 
in  humility,  which  is  past ;  the  second  in  royal  majesty,, 
which  is  still  to  come.*  Thus  full  and  clear  is  the  testimony 
of  the  latter  half  of  the  second  century,  not  only  to  the 

*  It  would  be  interesting  if  there  were  clear  evidence  that  the  work  from 
which  our  fragment  was  taken  was  read  by  any  ancient  author.  I 
think  it,  therefore,  worth  while  to  copy  the  account  which  St.  Jerome,  in 
the  preface  to  his  Commentary  on  St.  Matthew,  gives  of  the  four  Gospels, 
because  the  coincidences  with  our  fragment,  which  I  have  marked  in  Italics, 
seem  to  me  more  than  accidental.  '  Primus  omnium  Matthaeus  est  publi- 
canus,  cognomento  Levi,  qui  Evangelium  in  Judaea  Hebraeo  sermone  edidit : 
ob  eorum  vel  maxime  caussam,  qui  in  Jesum  crediderant  ex  Judaeis,  et  ne- 
quaquam  legis  umbram,  succedente  Evangeli  veritate  servabant.  Secundus 
Marcus,  interpres  Apostoli  Petri,  et  Alexandrinae  Ecclesiae  primus  epis- 
copus  ;  qui  Dominum  Salvatorem  ipse  non  vidtt,  sed  ea  quae  magistrum 
audierat  praedicantem,  juxta  fidem  magis  gestorum  narravit  quam  ordinem. 
Tertius  Lucas  medicus,  natione  Syrus  Antiochensis,  cujus  laus  in  Evan- 
gelio,  qui  et  ipse  discipulus  Apostoli  Pauli,  in  Achaiae  Bceotiseque  partibus 
volumen  condidit,  quaedam  altius  repetens  :  et  ut  ipse  in  procemio  confitetur 
audita  magis  quam  visa  describens.  Ultimus  Johannes  Apostolus  et  Evan- 
gelista,  quern  Jesus  amavit  plurimum;  qui  supra  pectus  Domini  recumbens, 
purissima  doctrinarum  fluenta  potavit,  et  qui  solus  de  cruce  meruit  audire, 
Ecce  mater  tua.  Is  quum  esset  in  Asia,  et  jam  tune  haereticorum  semina 
pullularent,  Cerinthi,  Ebionis,  et  caeterorum  qui  negant  Christum  in  carne 
venisse  (quos  et  ipse  in  Epistola  sua  Antichristos  vocat,  et  Apostolus 
Paulus  frequenter  percutit),  coactus  est  ab  omnibus pene  tune  Asiez  episcopis 
et  multarum  ecclesiarum  legationibus  de  divinitate  salvatoris  altius  scribere ; 
et  ad  ipsum  (ut  ita  dicam)  Dei  Verbum,  non  tarn  audaci,  quam  felici  teme- 
ritate  prorumpere.  Et  ecclesiastica  narrat  historia,  quum  a  fratribus 
cogeretur  ut  scriberet,  ita  facturum  se  respondisse  si  indicto  jejunio  omnes 
Deum  precarentur,  quo  expleto,  revelatione  saturatus,  in  illud  procemium 
ccelo  veniens  eructavit :  In  principio  erat  Verbum,  et  Verbum  erat  apud 
Deum,  et  Deus  erat  Verbum ;  Hoc  erat  in  principio  apud  Deum. 


v.]  CAIUS.  55 

genuineness  of  the  four  Gospels,  but  to  their  inspiration.  If 
nothing  more  could  be  adduced,  it  is  better  evidence  than 
that  which  satisfies  us  in  the  case  of  most  classical  writers. 

As  I  have  had  occasion  to  mention  these  two  disciples  of 
Irenaeus — Caius  and  Hippolytus — I  have  a  few  words  more  to 
say  about  each.  In  point  of  antiquity  they  may  be  regarded 
as  on  a  level  with  Clement  and  Tertullian,  though  but  younger 
contemporaries  of  Irenaeus.  And  I  may  say  in  passing,  that 
the  long  continuance  of  a  large  Greek  element  in  the  Roman 
Church  is  testified  by  the  fact,  that  although  Caius  and 
Hippolytus  both  held  office  in  that  Church  in  the  first 
quarter  of  the  third  century,  all  that  remains  of  either  is  in 
Greek  ;  and  Hippolytus  published  so  many  Greek  books, 
including  some  sermons,  that  I  am  not  without  doubts 
whether  he  could  use  Latin  at  all  for  literary  purposes. 

In  speaking  of  Irenaeus,  1  mentioned  that  he  builds  an 
argument  on  the  words  of  a  text  in  St.  Matthew's  Gospel,  in 
such  a  way  as  to  show  that  he  was  a  believer  in  the  verbal 
inspiration  of  the  Evangelist :  that  is  to  say,  that  he  looked 
on  the  choice  by  the  Evangelist  of  one  word  rather  than 
another  as  a  matter  to  be  regarded  not  as  due  to  the  acci 
dental  caprice  of  the  human  writer,  but  as  directed  and  over 
ruled  by  the  Holy  Spirit.  It  is  plain  that  anyone  who  holds 
such  an  opinion  about  any  book  must  feel  himself  bound  to 
see  that  special  care  shall  be  used  in  the  transcription  of  it, 
in  order  that  no  copyist  may  carelessly  or  wilfully  substitute 
words  of  his  own  for  the  words  dictated  by  the  Holy  Ghost. 
It  is  notorious  with  what  care  the  Massoretic  text  of  the  Old 
Testament  has  been  preserved  by  men  who  thought  that  a 
mystery  might  lie  in  every  word,  every  letter  of  the  sacred 
text.  What  kind  of  care  was  used  in  the  time  of  Irenaeus  we 
may  gather  from  an  interesting  adjuration  which  he  prefixed 
to  a  work  of  his  own — '  Whosoever  thou  art  who  shalt  tran 
scribe  this  book,  I  charge  thee  with  an  oath  by  our  Lord  Jesus 
Christ  and  by  His  glorious  appearing,  in  which  He  cometh  to 
judge  the  quick  and  dead,  that  thou  carefully  compare  what 
thou  hast  transcribed,  and  correct  it  according  to  this  copy 
whence  thou  hast  transcribed  it  ;  and  that  thou  transcribe 
this  oath  in  like  manner,  and  place  it  in  thy  copy'  (Euseb., 


56  THE   GOSPELS   IN   THE   EARLY   CHURCH.  [v. 

H.  E.,  v.  20)  We  may  safely  assume  that  Irenaeus  would  be 
solicitous  that  fully  as  much  care  and  reverence  should  be 
used  in  perpetuating  the  text  of  the  Gospels,  which  he  vene 
rated  so  highly  ;  and  we  may,  therefore,  regard  the  end  of  the 
second -century  as  a  time  when  a  check  was  being  put  on  the 
licentiousness  of  scribes  in  introducing  variations  into  the 
text  of  the  New  Testament  writings.  It  is  in  reference  to  this 
point  that  I  think  it  worth  while  to  make  a  quotation  from 
Caius.  Eusebius  (H.  E.,  v.  28)  has  preserved  some  extracts 
from  a  work  directed  against  the  followers  of  Artemon,  who, 
of  those  calling  themselves  Christians,  was  amongst  the 
earliest  to  hold  our  Blessed  Lord  to  have  been  mere  man. 
Internal  evidence  shows  the  work  to  belong  to  the  beginning 
of  the  third  century,  and  it  has  been  ascribed  both  to  Caius 
and  Hippolytus  ;  but  the  greater  weight  of  critical  authority, 
and,  in  my  opinion,  also  far  the  greater  weight  of  evidence, 
is  in  favour  of  the  ascription  to  Caius.  The  writer  pronounces 
the  doctrine  of  our  Lord's  simple  humanity  to  be  in  contradic 
tion  to  the  Holy  Scriptures  ;  and  it  is  plain,  from  the  nature 
of  the  case,  that  the  writings  which  he  thus  describes  as  Holy 
Scriptures,  and  as  teaching  the  doctrine  of  our  Lord's  Divinity, 
must  have  been  Scriptures  of  the  New  Testament.  But  from 
a  later  part  of  the  same  writing,  it  appears  that  the  subject 
of  various  readings  had,  at  that  early  date,  given  rise  to 
controversy.  Caius  accuses  his  opponents  of  having  tam 
pered  with  the  Holy  Scriptures,  of  having  published  what 
they  called  '  corrected  '  copies,  but  which,  in  his  judgment, 
were  simply  ruined.  He  appeals  to  the  fact  that  different 
*  correctors '  did  not  agree  among  themselves,  and  that  the 
same  man  was  not  always  consistent  with  himself,  his  later 
text  being  often  at  variance  with  his  earlier  ;  and  he  adds  :  *  I 
think  they  can  hardly  be  ignorant  themselves  what  impudent 
audacity  their  offence  involves.  For  either  they  do  not  be 
lieve  the  Divine  Scriptures  to  have  been  spoken  by  the  Holy 
Spirit,  and  then  they  are  nothing  but  infidels  ;  or  else  they 
think  that  they  are  wiser  than  the  Holy  Spirit,  and  who  could 
entertain  such  an  idea  but  a  demoniac  ? '  We  have  not  the 
means  of  judging  whether  the  anger  of  Caius  was  justly 
roused  by  perversions  of  the  sacred  text,  wilfully  made  in 


V.]  HIPPOLYTUS.  57 

order  to  remove  its  testimony  to  our  Lord's  Divinity,  or 
whether  he  was  but  the  blind  champion  of  aTextus  Receptus 
against  more  learned  critical  revisers.  The  important  point 
for  us  to  observe  is  how  strongly  the  doctrine  of  Scripture 
Inspiration  was  held  at  the  beginning  of  the  third  century ; 
and  you  will  see  how  well  justified  I  am  in  thinking  it  need 
less,  in  our  investigation  about  the  Gospels,  to  go  below  the 
age  of  Irenaeus,  the  tradition  which  he  handed  on  to  his  dis 
ciples  being  identical  with  that  which  the  Church  has  held 
ever  since. 

It  might  seem,  then,  needless  to  say  anything  about  Hip- 
polytus,  whose  literary  activity  mainly  belonged  to  the  first 
quarter  of  the  third  century  ;  and  so  it  would  be  needless,  if 
the  question  were  merely  about  his  own  opinions ;  but  the 
chief  value  of  Hippolytus  consists  in  the  information  he  has 
preserved  to  us  about  the  sentiments  of  earlier  writers,  and 
these,  men  whose  testimony  is  of  high  value  to  us  in  the 
present  investigation,  namely,  the  heretics  of  the  second 
century. 

We  are  never  so  secure  that  a  tradition  has  been  trans 
mitted  to  us  correctly  as  when  it  comes  through  different  in 
dependent  channels.  For  example,  to  touch  by  anticipation 
on  subjects  on  which  I  shall  have  to  speak  at  more  length  in 
other  courses  of  Lectures,  the  value  of  a  version  as  a  witness 
in  any  controversy  respecting  the  true  text  of  the  sacred 
writings  depends  on  the  facts  that  the  version  is,  for  all 
essential  purposes,  a  duplicate  of  the  manuscript  from  which 
the  translation  was  made,  and  that  the  corruptions  which  the 
two  will  suffer  in  the  process  of  transcription  are  likely  to  be 
different,  since  words  resembling  each  other  in  one  language 
will  probably  not  correspond  to  words  easily  interchanged  in 
the  other.  Hence  things  in  which  the  version  and  copies  of 
the  original  agree  may  safely  be  counted  to  be  as  old  as  the 
time  when  the  translation  was  made.  In  like  manner,  if,  in 
any  investigation  as  to  the  liturgical  usages  of  the  Eastern 
Church,  we  find  details  of  Eucharistic  celebration  common 
to  the  Catholics,  the  Nestorian,  and  the  Eutychian  sects,  we 
may  safely  reckon  these  details  to  be  at  least  as  ancient  as 
the  time  when  the  splitting  off  of  these  sects  took  place  ;  for 


58  THE    GOSPELS   IN    THE    EARLY   CHURCH.  [v. 

the  simple  reason,  that  it  is  very  unlikely  that  anything  sub 
sequently  introduced  in  one  of  mutually  hostile  communities 
would  be  adopted  by  the  other.  Similarly,  if  we  find  books 
enjoying  the  prerogatives  of  Scripture  in  orthodox  Churches 
and  heretical  sects  alike,  we  may  safely  conclude  that  these 
books  had  gained  their  position  before  the  separation  of  the 
heretical  sects  in  question.  A  forgery  of  later  date  would  not 
be  likely  to  be  accepted  by  both  alike,  and  to  be  treated  as 
common  ground  on  which  both  could  argue. 

The  work  of  Hippolytus,  which  has  thrown  a  great  deal  of 
light  on  the  Gnostic  speculations  of  the  second  century,  has 
only  become  known  in  my  own  time,  having  been  preserved 
in  only  a  single  manuscript,  which  was  brought  from  Mount 
Athos  to  Paris,  and  published  for  the  first  time  in  1851.  The 
title  is  the  '  Refutation  of  all  Heresies.'  The  method  of  refu 
tation  which  Hippolytus  principally  employed  is  one  which 
is  very  convenient  to  us,  and  probably  was  quite  enough  for 
his  orthodox  readers.  It  consisted  in  simply  repeating  the 
heretics'  doctrine  in  their  own  words,  the  object  being  to  ex 
hibit  its  identity  with  heathen  speculations.  In  this  way  we 
obtain  a  knowledge  of  several  heretical  writings,  of  which, 
except  through  this  book  of  Hippolytus,  we  should  not  have 
heard.  Now  common  to  all  these  writings  is  the  copious  use 
as  authoritative  of  our  four  Gospels,  and  in  particular  of  that 
Gospel  whose  date  has  been  brought  down  lowest,  the  Gospel 
according  to  St.  John.  We  do  not  gain  much  by  these  cita 
tions  when  the  heretics  quoted  are  only  known  to  us  by  the 
extracts  given  by  Hippolytus  ;  for  then  it  is  open  to  any  ob 
jector  to  say,  Oh  !  perhaps  these  writers  were  contemporary 
with  Hippolytus  himself,  or  very  little  older.  Who  can  assure 
us  that  the  heretical  documents  dragged  to  light  by  Hippo 
lytus  had  been  in  circulation  for  a  dozen  years  before  he  ex 
posed  them  ?  But  the  heretics  from  whose  works  Hippolytus 
gives  extracts  are  not  all  of  them  unknown  persons.  I  name 
in  particular  Basilides  and  Valentinus,  who  hold  a  prominent 
place  in  the  lists  of  everyone  who  has  written  about  the 
heretics  of  the  second  century.  Basilides  taught  in  the  reign 
of  Hadrian — let  us  say  about  the  year  130 — and  Valentinus 
taught  in  Rome  between  the  years  140  and  150.  In  fact, 


V.]  HIPPOLYTUS.  59 

both  these  schools  of  heretics  are  mentioned  by  Justin 
Martyr,  so  that  they  clearly  belong  to  the  first  half  of  the 
second  century,  and  chronologically  come  before  Justin 
Martyr,  of  whom  I  had  proposed  next  to  speak.  Now  in 
the  extracts  given  by  Hippolytus  purporting  to  be  from 
Basilides  and  Valentinus,  each  of  these  writers  not  only 
quotes  from  Paul's  Epistles  (including  that  to  the  Ephesians, 
one  doubted  by  Renan,  who  accepts  all  the  rest,  except  the 
Pastoral  Epistles),  but  each  also  makes  use  of  the  Gospels,  in 
particular  of  the  Gospel  according  to  St.  John.  I  may  say  in 
passing,  that  though  the  fourth  Gospel  is  that  which  is  most 
assailed  by  sceptical  writers,  yet  as  far  as  external  evidence 
is  concerned,  if  there  be  any  difference  between  this  Gospel 
and  the  others,  the  difference  is  in  its  favour — that  is  to  say, 
I  think  there  is  even  greater  weight  of  external  attestation  to 
this  than  to  the  rest.  And  the  use  made  of  St.  John's  Gospel 
by  all  the  heretics  of  the  second  century  is  no  small  argument 
in  favour  of  its  early  date.  The  answer  made  by  sceptical 
writers  to  these  quotations  in  Hippolytus  is,  Can  you  be  sure 
that  the  Valentinian  and  Basilidian  works  from  which  Hippo 
lytus  quotes  were  really  wrritten  by  the  heresiarchs  themselves  ? 
Is  it  not  possible  that,  when  he  professes  to  describe  the 
opinions  of  Valentinus  or  Basilides,  he  is  drawing  his  infor 
mation  from  the  work  of  some  disciple  of  each  of  these  sects 
who  lived  nearer  his  own  time,  the  ^r/o-i  with  which  Hippo 
lytus  introduces  the  quotations  being  merely  intended  to 
have  the  effect  of  inverted  commas  in  an  English  book,  and 
not  to  be  pressed  to  mean  that  Valentinus  himself  is  the 
speaker  ?  If  I  were  to  deal  with  this  answer  in  a  contro 
versial  spirit  I  might  describe  it  as  a  quite  gratuitous  as 
sumption,  and  a  mere  evasion  to  escape  a  difficulty,  to 
imagine  that  Hippolytus  can  mean  anything  but  what  he 
says,  or  to  suppose  that  words  which  he  distinctly  states  are 
those  of  Valentinus  are  to  be  understood  as  spoken  by  some 
body  else.  But  I  should  be  sorry  to  press  any  argument  the 
least  degree  further  than  in  my  own  heart  I  considered  it 
would  justly  bear ;  and  when  I  ask  myself  whether  I  can  say 
that  I  regard  Hippolytus  as  incapable  of  the  laxity  here  im 
puted  to  him,  I  cannot  say  that  I  do.  I  do  not  think  highly 


60  THE    GOSPELS    IN    THE    EARLY   CHURCH.  [v. 

of  his  critical  acumen,  and  I  cannot  pronounce  it  impossible 
that  he  may  have  erroneously  accepted  or  described  a  Valen- 
tinian  book  as  the  work  of  Valentinus  himself.  I  therefore 
do  not  insist  on  the  admission  that  the  heretical  works  cited 
are  as  old  as  the  words  of  Hippolytus,  literally  understood, 
would  make  them  out  to  be ;  and  for  my  purpose  I  can  be 
quite  satisfied  with  the  incontrovertible  fact  that,  in  the  time 
of  Hippolytus,  there  was  no  controversy  between  the  Valen- 
tinians  and  the  orthodox  as  to  their  New  Testament  Canon, 
and  in  particular  that  the  Gospel  of  John  was  alike  venerated 
by  both  parties. 

This  is  a  fact  which  we  can  abundantly  establish  by  other 
evidence.  The  whole  vocabulary  of  the  system  of  Valentinus 
is  founded  on  the  prologue  to  St.  John's  Gospel.  The  system 
of  Yalentinus  uses  as  technical  words,  /xovoyev^s,  £<o?7,  dA^em, 
Xapis,  7rA?7peo//,a,  Xoyos,  <£wg.  It  is  quite  impossible  to  invert 
the  order,  and  to  suppose  these  words  first  to  have  been  the 
key-words  of  a  heretical  system,  and  then  to  have  been  bor 
rowed  by  someone  desirous  to  pass  himself  off  as  St.  John, 
or  to  suppose  that  in  such  a  case  the  Gospel  could  ever  have 
found  acceptance  in  the  Church.  You  might  as  well  conceive 
someone  who  wanted  a  document  to  be  accepted  as  authori 
tative  by  us  Protestants,  stuffing  it  with  Roman  Catholic 
technical  words — Transubstantiation,  Purgatory,  and  such 
like.  Putting  in  such  words  would  clearly  show  any  Protes 
tant  that  the  document  emanated  from  a  hostile  body  ;  and 
so,  in  like  manner,  if  the  theory  of  Valentinus  had  been  pro 
mulgated  before  the  publication  of  the  fourth  Gospel,  the 
vocabulary  of  the  prologue  to  that  Gospel  would  have  ex 
cluded  it  from  Catholic  use.  There  is  abundance  of  other 
evidence  that  Catholics  and  Valentinians  were  agreed  as  to 
the  reverence  paid  to  this  Gospel.  Tertullian  contrasts  the 
methods  of  dealing  with  the  New  Testament  pursued  by 
Marcion,  of  whom  I  shall  speak  a  little  later,  and  by  Valen 
tinus.  Marcion  mutilated  his  New  Testament,  rejecting  all 
parts  of  it  which  he  could  not  reconcile  with  his  theories  ;  but 
Valentinus,  as  Tertullian  says,  '  integro  instrumento  uti  vide- 
tur'  (De  Pmscrip.  38);  that  is  to  say,  he  did  not  reject  the 
Gospels  accepted  by  the  Catholic  Church,  but  he  strove  by 


V.]  THE    VALENTINIANS.  6 1 

artificial  interpretation  to  make  them  teach  his  peculiar  doc 
trine.     How  true  this  statement  is  we  have  extant  evidence. , 
The  earliest  commentary  on  a  New  Testament  book  of  which)] 
we  have  any  knowledge  is  by  a  heretic — that  by  the  Valen-n 
tinian  Heracleon  on  St.  John.     It  is  known  to  us  through  the!' 
use  made  of  it  by   Origen,  who,  when  commenting  on  the 
same  book,  quotes  Heracleon  some  fifty  times,  sometimes 
agreeing  with  him,  but  more  usually  controverting  him.     We 
have  thus  a  very  minute  knowledge  of  Heracleon's  commen 
tary  on  at  least  four  or  five  chapters  of  St.  John.     And  this 
characteristic  prevails  throughout,  that  the  strongest  believer 
in  verbal  inspiration  at  the  present  day  could  not  dwell  with 
more  minuteness  on  the  language  of  St.  John,  or  draw  more 
mysteries  from  what  might  seem  the  accidental  use  of  one 
expression  rather  than  another. 

There  is  controversy  as  to  the  date  of  Heracleon.  All  we 
know  with  certainty  is,  that  he  must  have  been  earlier  than 
Clement  of  Alexandria,  who  quotes  him  twice  (Strom,  iv.  9; 
Eclog.  ex  Scrip.  Proph.  25).  Sceptical  writers  make  Heracleon 
as  little  earlier  than  Clement  as  they  can  help,  and  say  his 
commentary  may  have  been  as  late  as  180.  Orthodox  writers 
would  give  it  thirty  or  forty  years  greater  antiquity.  For  my  , 
part,  I  think  it  makes  little  difference  as  far  as  the  question 
of  the  antiquity  of  St.  John's  Gospel  is  concerned.  Heracleon 
was  a  Valentinian,  and  it  appears  that  in  his  time  the  autho 
rity,  and  I  think  we  may  say  the  inspiration,  of  John's  Gospel 
was  common  ground  to  the  Valentinians  and  the  Catholics, 
How  could  that  be  possible,  if  it  had  not  been  acknowledged 
before  the  Valentinians  separated  from  the  orthodox?  If 
the  book  had  been  written,  subsequently  to  the  separation, 
by  a  Valentinian,  the  orthodox  would  not  have  received 
it ;  if  by  a  Catholic  the  Valentinians  would  not  have  re 
ceived  it.  If  it  had  been  of  unknown  parentage,  it  is  in 
credible  that  both  communities  should  have  accepted  it  as 
Apostolic. 

What  has  been  said  about  Valentinus  may  be  repeated 
about  Basilides.  Hippolytus  produces  an  extract  in  which 
the  words  of  St.  John's  Gospel  are  twice  quoted  (vii.  22,  27), 
and  which  he  says,  as  plain  as  words  can  do  it,  is  taken  from 


62  THE   GOSPELS   IN   THE    EARLY   CHURCH.  [v. 

a  writing  of  Basilides.*1  Admit  that  Hippolytus  was  either 
misinformed  on  this  point,  or  through  inaccuracy  said  what 
he  did  not  mean  to  say,  it  still  remains  that  the  extract  was 
written  by  at  least  a  disciple  of  Basilides.  It  follows  that 
Basilidians  and  orthodox  agreed  in  their  reverence  for  St. 
John's  Gospel ;  and  it  follows,  then,  by  the  same  argument 
which  I  have  used  already,  that  St.  John's  Gospel  must  have 
gained  its  authority  before  Basilides  separated  from  the 
Church — that  is  to  say,  at  least  before  130.  This  evidence 
for  the  antiquity  of  St.  John  is  an  argument  a  fortiori  for  the 
antiquity  of  the  other  Gospels,  which  all  admit  to  be  earlier. 

I  may  here  mention  the  only  point  of  any  consequence  on 
which  a  difference  is  attempted  to  be  made  between  the  testi 
mony  to  the  fourth  Gospel  and  to  the  others,  viz.  that  though 
Papias,  of  whom  I  will  speak  presently,  names  Matthew  and 
Mark  as  the  authors  of  Gospels,  and  though  there  are  early 
anonymous  quotations  of  John's  Gospel,  the  first  to  mention 
John  by  name  as  its  author  is  Theophilus,  who  was  bishop  of 
Antioch  about  170  (adAutol.,  ii.  22).  But  this  point  is  of  very 
small  worth  ;  for  not  to  say  that  the  argument  might  be  used 
equally  against  Luke's  Gospel,  the  authorship  of  which  is  not 
seriously  contested,  there  cannot  be  a  doubt  that  any  evidence 
which  proves  the  antiquity  of  John's  Gospel  proves  also  its 
authorship.  In  other  words,  it  is  plain  from  the  work  itself 
that  whoever  composed  it  intended  it  to  be  received  as  ema 
nating  from  the  beloved  disciple  ;  and  we  cannot  doubt  that  it 
was  as  such  it  was  received  by  those  who  did  accept  it.  Let 
me  call  your  attention  to  the  singular  fact,  that  the  name  of 
the  Apostle  John  is  never  mentioned  in  St.  John's  Gospel. 
If  you  had  only  that  Gospel,  you  would  never  know  that  there 
was  an  Apostle  of  the  name.  The  other  Gospels,  when  they 
speak  of  the  forerunner  of  our  Lord,  always  give  him  the  title 
of  the  Baptist,  so  as  to  prevent  confusion  between  the  two 

*  Wesrcott  New  Testament  Canon,  p.  288)  gives  strong  reasons  for 
believing  the  extract  to  be  from  a  work  of  Basilides  himself.  So  also 
Hort,  Dictionary  of  Christian  Biography,  I.  271.  The  same  view  is 
taken  by  Matthew  Arnold,  God  and  the  Bible,  p.  268,  quoted  by  Dr. 
Ezra  Abbot  (Authorship  of  Fourth  Gospel,  p.  86).  But  since  there  is 
room  for  doubt,  I  use  an  argument  which  does  not  assume  the  Basilidian 
authorship. 


VI.]      THE  MIDDLE  OF  THE  SECOND  CENTURY.        63 

Johns.  This  Gospel  speaks  of  him  simply  as  John,  so  that  a 
reader  not  otherwise  informed  would  never  have  it  suggested 
to  him  that  there  was  another  of  the  name.  This  fact  is 
worth  attention  in  connexion  with  what  I  shall  have  here 
after  to  say  on  the  omissions  of  the  Gospel,  and  on  the  ques 
tion  whether  John  is  to  be  supposed  ignorant  of  everything 
he  does  not  record  in  his  Gospel.  I  shall  contend,  on  the 
contrary,  that  the  things  which  John  omits  are  things  so  very 
well  known  that  he  could  safely  assume  his  readers  to  be 
acquainted  with  them.  It  certainly  is  so  in  this  instance  ;  for 
no  one  disputes  that,  if  the  writer  were  not  the  Apostle  John, 
he  was  someone  who  wished  to  pass  for  him.  But  a  forger 
would  be  likely  to  have  made  some  more  distinct  mention  of 
the  person  who  played  the  principal  part  in  his  scheme ;  and 
he  certainly  could  scarcely  have  hit  on  such  a  note  of  genuine 
ness  as  that,  whereas  almost  everyone  in  the  Church  had  felt 
the  necessity  of  distinguishing  by  some  special  name  John 
the  forerunner  from  John  the  Apostle,  there  was  one  person 
who  would  feel  no  such  necessity,  and  who  would  not  form 
this  habit — namely,  the  Apostle  himself. 


VI. 

PART     III. 

THE      MIDDLE     OF     THE      SECOND      CENTURY. 
JUSTIN   MARTYR — TATIAN. 

It  may  now  be  regarded  as  proved,  that  towards  the  end  of 
the  second  century  our  four  Gospels  were  universally  accepted 
in  the  Catholic  Church  as  the  peculiarly  trustworthy  records 
of  the  Saviour's  life,  and  that  they  were  then  ascribed  to  the 
same  authors  as  those  to  whom  we  now  ascribe  them.  Why, 
then,  are  we  not  to  accept  this  testimony  ?  Is  it  because  of 
any  opposing  evidence,  external  or  internal  ?  Postponing  for 
a  moment  the  question  of  internal  evidence,  opposing  ex 
ternal  evidence  there  is  none.  All  that  can  be  said  is,  The 


64  THE    GOSPELS    IN   THE    EARLY   CHURCH.  [vi. 

evidence  you  have  produced  bears  date  a  hundred  years  later 
than  the  books  ;  we  desire  to  have  earlier  testimony.  Now, 
to  take  the  case  of  a  classical  author,  the  testimony  to  whom 
bears  some  faint  comparison  with  that  to  the  Gospels  ;  the 
plays  of  Terence  are  quoted  by  Cicero  and  Horace,  and  we 
require  neither  more  nor  earlier  witnesses.  No  one  objects  : 
Cicero  and  Horace  wrote  a  hundred  years  after  Terence ; 
what  earlier  witnesses  can  you  produce  to  account  for  the 
intervening  time  ?  In  the  case  of  the  Gospels,  however,  we 
can  meet  what  I  account  an  unreasonable  demand.  I  began 
with  the  end  of  the  second  century,  because  then  first  the 
Christian  literature  of  the  period  is  so  abundant  as  to  leave 
no  room  for  controversy  as  to  the  Gospels  accepted  by  that 
age.  We  can,  however,  go  back  a  couple  of  generations 
and  remain  on  ground  which  cannot  reasonably  be  con 
tested. 

The  Apology  of  Justin  Martyr  was  written  about  A.D.  150. 
That  is  the  date  Justin  himself  gives  (ApoL,  i.  46) ;  and  though, 
no  doubt,  it  is  only  a  round  number,  it  is  as  near  the  truth 
as  we  can  go.  The  Apology  is  addressed  to  the  Emperor 
Antoninus,  who  reigned  from  138-161,  and  it  twice  (cc.  29,  31) 
speaks  of  events  in  the  preceding  reign  (Hadrian's)  as  having 
happened  '  just  now.'  Hence,  some  place  the  Apology  in  the 
very  beginning  of  the  reign  of  Antoninus.  Eusebius  dates  it 
141.  Dr.  Hort,  in  one  of  his  earliest  writings,*  tried  to  prove 
that  Justin  died  in  148.  He  did  not  convince  me  that  there  is 
evidence  to  justify  any  positive  assertion  about  the  matter  ; 
but  in  placing  the  Apology  in  150,  about  the  middle  of  the 
reign  of  Antoninus,  we  are  sure  that  we  cannot  be  very  far 
wrong  either  way. 

There  has  been  a  good  deal  of  dispute  about  Justin's  New 
Testament  citations  ;  but,  as  far  as  the  judgment  of  candid 
men  is  concerned,  the  question  may  now  be  regarded  as 
settled.  The  result  of  very  long  discussions  and  of  a  good 

*  Journal  of  Classical  and  Sacred  Philology,  iii.  155.  1856.  On  the 
other  hand,  if  we  can  rely  on  the  genuineness  of  the  Acts  of  Justin's 
martyrdom,  he  was  condemned  by  Rusticus ;  and  Borghesi,  Outrages, 
viii.  545,  has  made  out  a  probable  case  that  Rusticus  was  praefectus 
urbi  between  163  and  167. 


VI.]  JUSTIN   MARTYR.  65 

deal  of  fighting  has  been  to  leave  us  where  we  had  been. 
Any  ordinary  reader  would  have  no  doubt  that  Justin's 
works  contain  copious  quotations  from  our  Gospels  ;  and 
the  objections  to  accepting  this  conclusion  made  by  those 
who  professed  to  have  gone  closely  into  the  matter  have 
been  dissipated  by  still  closer  examination.  In  his  refe 
rences  to  the  events  of  our  Lord's  life,  Justin  goes  over  all) 
the  ground  covered  by  our  Evangelists,  and  almost  com 
pletely  abstains  from  going  beyond  it.  He  informs  us  also 
that  he  drew  from  written  sources  the  accounts  which  he 
gives  of  our  Lord's  life.  It  is  true,  and  our  adversaries  make 
the  most  of  it,  that  he  does  not  mention  the  names  of  the 
authors  of  these  records.  But  the  reason  is,  that  he  is  ad 
dressing  heathen  who  would  not  be  interested  in  knowing 
the  names  of  the  Christian  writers  quoted  ;  and  he  purposely' 
avoids  using  Christian  technical  language.  Thus,  when  he 
describes  the  Christian  meetings  for  worship  on  the  Lord's 
day,  he  says  that  they  take  place  on  the  day  which  is  called 
the  '  day  of  the  sun ' ;  and  again,  he  calls  the  Jews  '  bar 
barians.'  And  so  now  he  tells  his  heathen  readers  that 
he  is  quoting  from  '  memoirs '  of  our  Lord  which  are  called 
*  Gospels,'  and  which  were  composed  by  the  Apostles  and 
by  those  who  followed  them.  Observe  how  accurately  this! 
agrees  with  our  present  Gospels — two  being  composed  by) 
Apostles,  two  by  their  immediate  followers. 

Justin  adds  that  these  memoirs  were  read  along  with  the 
writings  of  the  prophets  at  the  meetings  of  Christians  on  each 
Sunday.  Now,  is  it  credible  that  the  Gospels  which  Justin 
attests  to  have  been  placed  by  the  Christian  Church  in  equal 
rank  with  the  prophets  of  the  Old  Testament,  and  to  have 
been  weekly  read  in  their  public  assemblies,  could  be  different 
from  those  Gospels  which  were  confessedly  a  few  years  after 
wards  exclusively  recognized  through  the  Christian  world  ? 
Here  comes  in  with  great  force  the  reflex  action,  to  which  I 
have  already  referred,  of  the  testimony  of  Irenaeus.  In  his 
time  our  four  Gospels  were  in  such  long-established  honour, 
that  it  is  certain  they  must  have  had  the  same  rank  at  least 
one  generation  earlier.  In  Justin's  time,  some  Gospels  were 
in  such  honour  as  to  be  placed  on  a  level  in  Church  use  with 

F 


66  THE    GOSPELS    IN   THE   EARLY   CHURCH.  [vi. 

the  Old  Testament  Scriptures.  We  never  hear  of  any  revolution 
dethroning  one  set  of  Gospels  and  replacing  them  by  another  ; 
and  we  may  therefore  conclude  with  tolerable  certainty  that 
the  Gospels  honoured  by  the  Church  in  Justin's  day  were  the 
same  as  those  to  which  the  same  respect  was  paid  in  the  days 
of  Irenaeus,  some  twenty  or  thirty  years  later. 

The  only  plausible  ground  on  which  this  has  been  con 
tested  is  that  Justin's  citations  frequently  do  not  verbally 
correspond  with  our  Gospels.  Many  of  the  differences  that 
have  been  pointed  out  are  trivial  enough,  as  an  example  will 
enable  you  to  judge.  In  order  to  show  how  pure  was  the 
morality  taught  by  our  Lord,  Justin  devotes  three  consecu 
tive  chapters  to  quoting  his  precepts.  No  other  idea  than 
that  Justin  was  quoting  our  Gospels  would  occur  to  anyone 
whose  acuteness  had  not  been  sharpened  by  the  exigencies 
of  controversy.  For  instance,  '  He  said,  "Give  to  him  that 
asketh,  and  from  him  that  would  borrow  turn  not  away ;  for 
if  ye  lend  to  them  of  whom  ye  hope  to  receive  what  new 
thing  do  ye  ?  Even  the  publicans  do  this.  Lay  not  up  for 
•  yourselves  treasure  upon  earth,  where  moth  and  rust  doth 
corrupt,  and  where  robbers  break  through ;  but  lay  up  for 
yourselves  treasure  in  heaven,  where  neither  moth  nor  rust 
doth  corrupt.  For  what  is  a  man  profited  if  he  shall  gain 
the  whole  world  and  lose  his  own  soul  ?  or  what  shall  a  man 
give  in  exchange  for  it  ?  Lay  up  treasure,  therefore,  in 
heaven,  where  neither  moth  nor  rust  doth  corrupt."  And, 
i "  Be  ye  kind  and  merciful,  as  your  Father  also  is  kind  and 
merciful,  and  maketh  His  sun  to  rise  on  sinners,  and  the 
righteous  and  the  wicked.  Take  no  thought  what  ye  shall 
eat  or  what  ye  shall  put  on  ;  are  ye  not  better  than  the  birds 
and  the  beasts  ?  and  God  feedeth  them.  Take  no  thought, 
therefore,  what  ye  shall  eat  or  what  ye  shall  put  on  ;  for  your 
heavenly  Father  knoweth  that  ye  have  need  of  these  things. 
But  seek  ye  the  kingdom  of  heaven,  and  all  these  things  shall 
\be  added  to  you.  For  where  his  treasure  is,  there  also  is  the 
mind  of  a  man."  And,  "  Do  not  these  things  to  be  seen  of 
men,  otherwise  ye  have  no  reward  from  your  Father  which  is 
in  heaven." '  I  need  not  pursue  the  quotation.  I  have  read 
enough  to  enable  you  to  understand  the  general  character  of 


VI.]  JUSTIN   MARTYR.  67 

Justin's  quotations.  You  will  at  once  have  recognized  the 
words  I  read.  If  I  ask  you  whence  are  they  taken,  you  may 
perhaps  reply,  From  the  Sermon  on  the  Mount.  But  if  I  go 
on  to  ask  :  Do  you  mean  from  the  discourse  recorded  by  St. 
Matthew,  or  from  a  parallel  passage  in  St.  Luke  ?  you  examine 
more  minutely,  and  perhaps  you  find  that  Justin's  version 
does  not  verbally  agree  with  one  or  other.  Then  comes  the 
question  :  How  do  you  know  that  Justin  is  quoting  either  : 
May  he  not  be  taking  his  account  from  some  other  Gospel 
now  lost,  which  contained  a  record  of  the  same  discourses  ? 
As  far  as  the  evidences  of  our  religion  are  concerned,  it 
makes  no  difference  whether  or  not  the  hypothesis  of  a  lost 
Gospel  be  true.  It  is  no  part  of  our  faith  to  hold  the  doctrine 
of  Irenseus,  that  it  was  in  the  nature  of  things  impossible 
there  should  be  more  than  four  Gospels.  We  want  to  know 
what  was  the  story  concerning  Jesus  of  Nazareth,  in  attes 
tation  of  which  the  first  preachers  of  Christianity  were  con 
tent  to  suffer  hardships,  and  if  need  be  to  give  their  lives  ;  and* 
to  give  us  that  information  the  Gospel  used  by  Justin,  what 
ever  it  was,  answers  our  purpose  as  well  as  any  Gospel  we  have. 
It  might  be  uncomfortable  to  our  feelings  to  believe  that 
Christian  writers  for  the  first  century  and  a  half  used  a  dif 
ferent  Gospel  from  ours,  and  that  the  Church,  A.D.  170,  for 
some  unaccountable  reason,  thought  proper  to  bury  its 
ancient  text-book  in  oblivion,  and  set  up  our  four  Gospels  in 
its  room.  But  what  would  scepticism  have  gained,  when  it 
is  also  proved  that  this  lost  Gospel  must  have  been  as  like  to 
our  present  Gospels  as  the  Gospels  of  St.  Matthew  and  St. 
Mark  are  to  each  other  ?*  Substantially  the  same  facts  are 
related  in  all,  and  told  in  the  same  way. 

I  will  just  take  the  account  of  our  Lord's  infancy,  the  sub 
ject  above  all  others  on  which  the  apocryphal  Gospels  after 
wards  ran  wild,  and  you  will  see  that  Justin  follows  throughout 
the  narrative  of  our  existing  Evangelists.  He  does  not  appear 
to  have  known  anything  more  than  they  knew,  and  he  tells, 
without  doubt,  what  they  have  related.  I  give  a  summary  in 


*  This  idea  has  been  worked  out  by  Mr.  Sadler  in  his  book  called  '  The 
Lost  Gospel.' 

F2 


68  THE    GOSPELS   IN    THE   EARLY   CHURCH.  [vi. 

Westcott's  words  (New  Testament  Canon,  p.  101): — 'He 
tells  us  that  Christ  was  descended  from  Abraham  through 
Jacob,  Judah,  Phares,  Jesse,  and  David  —  that  the  angel 
Gabriel  was  sent  to  announce  His  birth  to  the  Virgin  Mary 
— that  this  was  a  fulfilment  of  the  prophecy  of  Isaiah  (vii.  14) 
— that  Joseph  was  forbidden  in  a  vision  to  put  away  his 
espoused  wife  when  he  was  so  minded — that  our  Saviour's 
birth  at  Bethlehem  had  been  foretold  by  Micah — that  His 
parents  went  thither  from  Nazareth,  where  they  dwelt,  in 
consequence  of  the  enrolment  of  Cyrenius — that  as  they  could 
not  find  a  lodging  in  the  village,  they  lodged  in  a  cave  close 
by  it,  where  Christ  was  born,  and  laid  by  Mary  in  a  manger 
— that  while  there,  wise  men  from  Arabia,  guided  by  a  star, 
worshipped  Him,  and  offered  Him  gold,  and  frankincense, 
and  myrrh,  and  by  revelation  were  commanded  not  to  return 
to  Herod,  to  whom  they  had  first  come — that  He  was  called 
Jesus,  as  the  Saviour  of  His  people — that  by  the  command  of 
God  His  parents  fled  with  Him  to  Egypt  for  fear  of  Herod, 
and  remained  there  till  Archelaus  succeeded  him — that  Herod, 
being  deceived  by  the  wise  men,  commanded  the  children  of 
Bethlehem  to  be  put  to  death,  so  that  the  prophecy  of  Jere 
miah  was  fulfilled,  who  spoke  of  Rachel  weeping  for  her 
children — that  Jesus  grew  after  the  common  manner  of  men, 
working  as  a  carpenter,  and  so  waited  thirty  years,  more  or 
less,  till  the  coming  of  John  the  Baptist.'  I  need  not  continue 
Justin's  account  of  our  Saviour's  life.  This  specimen  of  his 
account  of  that  part  of  it  where,  if  anywhere,  a  difference 
from  the  canonical  Gospels  would  be  likely  to  be  found,  is 
enough  to  show  that  the  Gospel  used  by  Justin  told  substan 
tially  the  same  story  as  that  related  in  the  Gospels  we  have, 
and  that,  as  far  as  controversy  with  unbelievers  is  concerned, 
it  is  quite  immaterial  which  Gospel  is  appealed  to. 

There  remains  the  purely  literary  question,  Is  there  reason 

to  believe  in  the  existence  of  this  alleged  lost  Gospel  ?   '  Entia 

non  sunt  multiplicanda  praeter  necessitatem,'  and  the  question 

II is,  Are  we  put  under  a  necessity  of  postulating  the  existence 

I  of  a  Gospel  which  has  disappeared,  by  reason  of  verbal  differ- 

jj  ences  forbidding  us  to  find  in  our  present  Gospels  the  source 

V  of  Justin's  quotations  ?     An  answer  to  this  question  has  been 


VI.]  JUSTIN   MARTYR.  69 

provided  by  a  study  of  Justin's  quotations  from  the  Old  Tes 
tament,  which  enables  us  to  know  what  degree  of  accuracy  is 
to  be  expected  from  him.  In  that  case  we  know  what  he 
means  to  quote,  and  we  find  him  quoting  loosely  and  inaccu 
rately,  and  quoting  the  same  'passage  differently  different 
times.*  When  we  think  it  strange  that  an  ancient  father  of 
Justin's  date  should  not  quote  with  perfect  accuracy,  we  for-| 
get  that  in  those  days,  when  manuscripts  were  scarce,  and 
when  concordances  did  not  exist,  the  process  of  finding  a 
passage  in  a  manuscript  (written  possibly  with  no  spaces 
between  the  words),  and  copying  it,  was  not  performed  with 
quite  as  much  ease  as  an  English  clergyman,  writing  his 
sermon  with  his  Bible  at  his  side,  can  turn  up  any  text  he 
wishes  to  refer  to;  and  yet  I  should  be  sorry  to  vouch  for 
the  verbal  accuracy  of  all  the  Scripture  citations  we  hear  in 
sermons  at  the  present  day.  The  excuse  for  such  inaccuracy 
at  present  is  one  which  Justin,  too,  may  have  pleaded — that 
exactly  in  proportion  to  a  man's  familiarity  with  a  book  is 
his  disposition  to  trust  his  memory,  and  not  verify  a  reference 
to  it.  And  the  applicability  of  this  remark  is  confirmed  by 
the  fact  that  there  is  very  much  less  accuracy  in  Justin's  short 
quotations,  which  would  be  made  from  memory,  than  in  his 
long  ones,  where  it  would  be  worth  while  or  necessary  for 
him  to  turn  to  the  book. 

On  the  whole,  then,  the  general  coincidence,  in  range  and 
contents,  of  Justin's  quotations  with  our  Gospels  is  enough 
to  show  that  they  are  the  sources  whence  Justin  drew  his 

*  See  a  table  of  Justin's  Old  Testament  quotations  given  by  Westcott 
(New  Testament  Canon,  p.  172).  Dr.  Sanday,  in  his  Gospels  in  the 
Second  Century,  has  shown  that  no  greater  exactness  of  quotation  is 
found  when  we  study  the  quotations  of  the  Old  Testament  in  the  New,  or 
in  the  Apostolic  Fathers,  or  the  quotations  of  the  New  Testament  by 
Irenseus.  I  find  in  an  unpublished  Paper  by  the  late  Bishop  Fitz  Gerald 
an  apposite  quotation  from  the  preface  to  Pearce's  'Longinus': — Neque 
enim  aut  Longino  aut  aliis  priorum  saeculorum  scriptoribus  videtur  usi- 
tatum  fuisse  accurate  fideque  satis  verba  citare.  Imo  nusquam  si  bene 
memini,  Longinus  per  totum  suum  Commentarium  cujusvis  auctoris  locum 
iisdem  verbis  (modo  pluribus  quam  duobus  aut  tribus  consisteret)  exhibuit ; 
nee  aliter  ab  aliis  scriptoribus  factum  video.  Si  enim  sensum  auctoris  et 
praecipua  citatae  sententiae  verba  ob  oculos  lectoris  ponerent,  de  caeteris 
minus  soliciti  fuere.  Accurata  haec  citandi  diligentia,  qua  hodie  utimur, 
-quaeque  laudabilis  sane  est,  frustra  in  veteribus  quaerenda  est. — Praef.  in 
Longinum,  p.  xix.,  ed.  1732. 


70  THE    GOSPELS   IN   THE   EARLY   CHURCH.  [vi. 

information.  I  will  give  for  each  of  the  Gospels  one  speci 
men  of  a  multitude  of  proofs.  In  relating  the  murder  of  the 
innocents  at  Bethlehem,  he  quotes  Jeremiah's  prophecy  of 
Rachel  weeping  for  her  children,  and  that  in  a  form  agreeing 
with  St.  Matthew  and  differing  from  the  Septuagint.  Hence, 
even  if  we  had  no  other  proof,  we  could  infer  that  he  used 
St.  Matthew's  Gospel.  Mark  has  so  little  that  is  not  in  St. 
Matthew  or  St.  Luke  that  it  might  be  thought  difficult  to 
identify  anonymous  citations  with  his  Gospel.  Yet  Justin's 
quotations  from  the  Gospels  are  so  numerous,  that  besides 
some  very  probable  references  to  Mark,  they  touch  on  one 
point  certainly  peculiar  to  him,  namely,  that  Jesus  gave  to 
the  sons  of  Zebedee  the  name  of  Boanerges.  St.  Mark  alone 
has  preserved  to  us  this  and  some  other  Aramaic  words  used 
by  our  Saviour,  as  Corban,  Ephphatha,  Abba,  Talitha  Cumi. 
St.  Luke  is,  no  doubt,  Justin's  authority  for  stating  that  the 
visit  of  Mary  and  Joseph  to  Bethlehem  was  occasioned  by 
the  taxing  under  Cyrenius.  And  I  may  add  that  Justin  even 
helps  us  in  the  case  of  disputed  readings  in  St.  Luke,  for  he 
has  a  reference  to  our  Lord's  bloody  sweat,  which  gives  an 
important  attestation  to  the  verses,  Luke  xxii.  43,  44,  which 
are  wanting  in  the  Vatican  and  Alexandrian  MSS.,  but  found 
in  the  Sinaitic  as  well  as  in  almost  all  other  MSS.  As  I  have 
mentioned  the  subject  of  various  readings,  I  may  add  that  if 
it  could  be  proved  that  Justin  never  trusted  his  memory,  but 
always  literally  copied  the  Gospel  he  was  using — a  thing  that 
cannot  be  proved,  for  he  sometimes  quotes  the  same  passage 
differently — it  still  would  not  follow  that  he  was  using  a 
different  Gospel  from  ours.  It  might  only  be  that  his  copy 
of  Matthew  or  Luke  had  readings  different  from  our  received 
text.  I  will  not  anticipate  what  belongs  to  another  branch  of 
our  subject  by  entering  into  the  proofs  of  the  early  existence 
of  various  readings.  Suffice  it  to  say  that  this  is  a  point  which 
has  to  be  attended  to  by  any  careful  critic  of  Justin's  quota 
tions.  That  Justin  used  the  three  Synoptic  Gospels  may  be 
regarded  as  now  accepted  by  the  common  consent  of  candid 
critics  :  being  as  freely  acknowledged  by  Hilgenfeld*  in  Ger- 

*  Professor  of  Theology  at  Jena,  one  of  the  ablest  living  representatives 
of  the  school  of  criticism  founded  by  Baur. 


VI.]  JUSTIN   MARTYR.  7 1 

many  as  by  Lightfoot  or  Westcott  in  England.  Justin's  varia 
tions,  then,  from  our  text  of  these  Gospels  may  be  divided 
into  three  classes.     The  greater  number  are  quite  sufficiently 
accounted  for  by  the  ordinary  looseness  of  memoriter  citations  ; 
a  few  demand  the  attention  of  the  textual  critic  as  suggesting 
the  possible  existence  of  a  various  reading  in  Justin's  manu 
script  ;  and  lastly,  a  few  more  suggest  the  possibility  that,  in 
addition  to  our  Gospels,  Justin  may  have  used  an  extra- 
Canonical  Gospel.     For  example,  in  the  abstract  I  read  of 
Justin's  account  of  our  Lord's  childhood,  you  may  perhaps 
have  noticed  that  he  says  that  the  Magi  came  from  Arabia. 
Now,  St.  Matthew  only  says  that  they  came  from  the  East ; 
and  the  question  arises,   Did  Justin  draw  this  localization 
from  a  written  source,  or  was  he  merely  expressing  the  view 
in  his  time  popularly  held  as  to  what  St.  Matthew  meant  by 
the  East  ?     A  similar  question  arises  as  to  the  statement  that 
Joseph  and  Mary,  when  they  could  find  no  room  in  the  inn, 
lodged  in  a  cave.     It  seems  to  me  very  possible  that  Justin 
was  here  drawing  from  no  written  source,  but  that,  being  a 
native  of  Palestine,  he  described  what  the  received  tradition 
of  his  time  accepted  as  the  scene  of  our  Lord's  birth.  Justin's 
additions  to  our  evangelic  narrative  are  exceedingly  few  and 
unimportant  ;    but  there  is  no  reason  why  we  should  not 
admit,  as  a  possible  account  of  them,  that  our  Gospels  were 
not  the  only  written  documents  with  which  Justin  was  ac 
quainted.      But  I   do  not  think  it  possible  that  any  such 
document  could  be  raised  to  the  level  of  our  four  Gospels, 
even  if  it  had  the  benefit  of  far  more  distinct  recognition  by 
Justin  than  it  can  actually  claim. 

I  have  said  that  Justin's  use  of  the  Synoptic  Gospels  is 
now  pretty  generally  admitted;  but  there  is  still  a  good  deal 
of  unwillingness  to  acknowledge  his  use  of  St.  John's.  That 
Gospel  deals  less  in  history  than  do  the  first  three  Gospels  ; 
and  so  there  are  fewer  incidents  mentioned  by  Justin  which 
we  can  clearly  prove  to  be  taken  from  St.  John,  while  the 
discourses  of  that  Gospel  present  little  that  is  suitable  for 
quotation  in  discussion  with  unbelievers.  Yet  there  are  coinci 
dences  enough  to  establish  satisfactorily  Justin's  acquaintance 
with  the  fourth  Gospel,  there  being  scarcely  a  chapter  of  it 


72  THE   GOSPELS    IN   THE   EARLY   CHURCH.  [VI. 

of  which  some  trace  may  not  be  found  in  his  works.*  But 
what  weighs  with  me  far  more  is,  that  the  whole  doctrinal 
system  of  Justin,  and  in  particular  his  conception  of  our  Lord 
as  the  eternal  Logos,  presupposes  St.  John  to  such  an  extent, 
that  anyone  who  does  not  acknowledge  it  is,  in  my  judgment, 
either  a  poor  critic  or  an  uncandid  controversialist.  The 
name  '  Logos  '  is  habitually  used  by  Justin,  occurring  more 
than  twenty  times.  His  doctrine  is,  that  this  Logos  existed 
before  all  creation,  dwelling  with  the  Father  ;f  that  He  was 
God;J  that  by  Him  all  things  were  made;§  that  this  pre- 
existent  Word  took  form  and  became  man,  and  was  called 
Jesus  Christ  (Apol.  i.  5,  63  ;  Dial.  48)  ;  and  that  He  was  the 
only-begotten  ||  of  the  Father. 

*  See  an  Article  by  Thoma  in  Hilgenfeld's  Zeitschrift  fur  wissenschaftl. 
Theologie  for  1875.  Thoma  does  not  discuss  Justin's  knowledge  of  the 
Synoptic  Gospels,  regarding  this  as  having  passed  out  of  the  reign  of  con 
troversy;  but  he  takes  St.  John,  chapter  by  chapter,  exhibiting  for  each 
the  trace  it  has  left  in  Justin's  works  :  the  result  being  to  show  that  Justin 
is  completely  saturated  with  that  Gospel.  Thoma  is  less  successful  in 
establishing  a  special  theory  of  his  own,  namely,  that  Justin,  though 
acquainted  with  the  fourth  Gospel,  did  not  regard  it  as  of  equal  authority 
with  the  others,  or  number  it  among  the  '  Memoirs  of  the  Apostles, ' 
which  were  read  in  the  Christian  public  worship.  For  this  he  has  no 
proof  but  the  very  precarious  argument  ex  silentio,  that  Justin  does  not 
make  as  much  use  of  the  fourth  Gospel  as  Thoma  thinks  he  would  have 
made  if  he  owned  its  authority.  Dr.  Ezra  Abbot,  a  Unitarian,  Professor 
in  Harvard  University,  has  dealt  well  with  this  argument  in  his  Authorship 
of  the  Fourth  Gospel,  p.  63.  He  shows  that  Justin,  writing  to  unbelievers, 
cannot  be  expected  to  make  the  use  of  New  Testament  writings  he  would 
have  made  if  addressing  men  who  owned  their  authority ;  that  he  actually 
uses  them  more  than  do  other  apologists ;  that  he  does  not  offer  proofs 
from  the  Apocalypse,  though  he  confessedly  accepted  it  as  an  inspired 
prophecy;  and  Dr.  Abbot  adds  some  instances  from  modern  writers 
of  surprising  neglect  to  use  an  argument  or  recognize  a  fact  which  we 
should  have  confidently  expected  them  to  use  or  recognize.  Dr.  Abbot, 
who  was  one  of  the  most  learned  of  American  Theologians,  died  in  1885. 

1"  <5  Se  vihs  efceij/ou,  6  /j.6i/os  \ty6/mevos  Kvpiws  vl6s,  6  \6yos  irpb  TUV  irotrj- 
Kal  ffvvtav  KO.\  •ytvv&iJ.svos,  ore  rrjv  apxty  8t  avrov  irtivTa.  e/CTt(Te  Kal 
. — ApoL  ii.  6. 

Trp"h  iravTiav  rfav  Krifffjiarfav  6  &ebs  yeyevvrjKe  Svvaftiv  Tij/a  e£ 
eai/Tov  XoyiKTjv,  TJTJS  Kal  8cJ|a  Kvpiov  inrb  rov  •jrvevfj.a.'ros  rov  ayiov  KaXe?T<U, 
iroTe  5e  vlbs,  Trore  5e  ffocpia,  Trore  5e  &yyz\os,  Trore  Se  0ebs,  TTOTC  Se  Kvpios  Kal 
\6yos. — Dial.  61. 

7rp&  Ttavrcav  TU>V  TronjfjLaTcav  ffvvriv  Ty  Trarpi. — Dial.  62. 

+  ourbs  S>v  OVTOS  6  debs  airb  rov  Trarpbs  TGOV  oXtav  yevvrjOeis. — Dial.  6 1  ; 
see  also  Apol.i.  63;  Dial.  56,  58,  126,  128. 

§  Share  Xoycf  Qtov  .  .  .  yeyevfjadai  rbv  irdvra  K6ffp.ov. — Apol.  i.  52  >  see 
also  c.  64,  and  Apol.  ii.  6. 

||  fji.ovoyfvrjs  i\v  ry  trarpl  TWV  S\cov. — Dial.  105. 


VI.]  JUSTIN   MARTYR.  73 

I  have  by  no  means  enumerated  all  the  coincidences  be 
tween  the  teaching  of  Justin  and  the  prologue  of  St.  John  ; 
but  that  there  is  very  striking  agreement  you  cannot  have 
failed  to  see.  We  ask,  is  there  any  reason  for  rejecting  the 
simple  account  of  this  agreement,  that  Justin  was  a  disciple 
of  St.  John  :  not  indeed  by  personal  companionship,  but  by 
study  of  his  Gospel,  which  we  have  good  independent  reason 
to  think  must  have  been  current  at  the  time,  and  which  Jus 
tin  could  hardly  have  helped  knowing  ?  And  it  deserves  to 
be  borne  in  mind  that  Justin  seems  to  have  learned  his 
Christianity  at  Ephesus  (Euseb.,  H.  E.  iv.  18),  which  is 
generally  allowed  to  have  been  the  birthplace  of  the  fourth 
Gospel.  When  we  have  to  speak  of  the  agreement  between 
Justin  and  the  Synoptic  Evangelists  as  to  the  incidents  of  our 
Saviour's  life  on  earth,  it  is  now  felt  to  be  a  gratuitous  and 
unreasonable  assumption  to  imagine  that  Justin  drew  his 
account  not  from  our  Synoptics,  but  from  a  lost  Gospel 
-coincident  with  them  in  a  multitude  of  particulars.  Have, 
we  any  stronger  justification  for  imagining  a  lost  spiritual) 
Gospel  identical  with  St.  John's  in  respect  of  its  teaching  as: 
to  the  pre-existence  and  divinity  of  our  Lord  ?  Not  that; 
these  doctrines  are  peculiar  to  St.  John  :  they  are  taught 
•as  distinctly  by  St.  Paul  (see  in  particular  Col.  i.) ;  but  what 
may  be  regarded  as  special  to  St.  John  is  the  use  of  the  word 
Logos,  to  denote  the  pre-existent  Saviour.  This  name  is  not 
found  in  any  of  the  New  Testament  writings  but  the  Johan- 
nine,*  nor  does  John  represent  our  Lord  as  ever  calling  him 
self  by  it.  If  we  ask  from  what  other  source  but  St.  John  the} 
name  could  have  been  derived  by  Justin,  we  are  referred  to 
the  writings  of  the  Alexandrian  Jew  Philo,  who  speaks  fre 
quently  of  the  Divine  Word,  though  there  has  been  much 
controversy  whether  he  means  to  ascribe  to  Him  a  distinct 
personality,  or  merely  uses  personifying  language  about  the 
Divine  attribute  of  Wisdom.  Nothing  forbids  us  to  believe 
that  the  speculations  of  Philo  may  have  been  known  to  St.. 
John.f  We  have  in  fact  a  connecting-link  in  the  Alexandrian' 

*  It  is  not  certain  whetherHeb.  iv.  12  is  an  exception  to  what  is  here  stated, 
t  Philo  was  teaching  in  Alexandria  in  our  Lord's  lifetime,  so  there  is 
no  chronological  difficulty. 


74  THE    GOSPELS    IN   THE    EARLY   CHURCH.  |_VI. 

Jew  Apollos,  who  taught  in  Ephesus.  It  would  be  quite  in 
the  spirit  in  which  Paul  dealt  with  the  Grecian  philosophers 
at  Athens  if  John,  when  not  professing  to  record  the  words  of 
Jesus,  but  speaking  in  his  own  person,  presented  Christianity 
to  those  whose  training  had  been  Alexandrian,  by  acknow 
ledging  and  accepting  all  that  was  true  in  the  Philonic  specu 
lations  about  the  Divine  Logos,  but  went  on  to  tell  of  what 
Philo  had  not  dreamed,  that  '  the  Word  became  flesh,  and 
dwelt  among  us.'  Now  what  we  find  in  Justin  is  not  the 
.  Philonic  but  the  Johannine  doctrine  of  the  Logos,  the  doc 
trine  of  the  Logos  incarnate  in  the  person  of  Jesus  Christ.. 
If  before  Justin's  time  anyone  but  the  fourth  Evangelist  had 
presented  in  this  form  his  doctrine  concerning  our  Lord,  how 
is  it  that  all  memory  of  it  has  perished  ?* 

Let  me  next  say  something  of  Justin's  mode  of  presenting 
another  Christian  doctrine,  that  of  Baptism.  Justin's  name 
for  the  rite  is  *  regeneration.'  Speaking  of  new  converts,  he 
says  (Apol.  i.  61):  '  They  are  brought  by  us  where  there  is 
water,  and  are  regenerated  in  the  same  manner  that  we  our 
selves  were  regenerated.  For  they  then  receive  the  washing 
of  water  in  the  name  of  God  the  Father  and  Lord  of  the 
Universe,  and  of  our  Saviour  Jesus  Christ,  and  of  the  Holy 
Spirit.  For  Christ  also  said,  "  Except  ye  be  born  again,  ye 
shall  not  enter  the  kingdom  of  heaven."  Now  that  it  is  im 
possible  for  those  who  have  been  once  born  to  enter  into 

*  The  relations  between  the  Logos  doctrine  of  Justin  and  that  of  Philo 
and  of  St.  John  have  been  carefully  investigated  by  a  very  able  and  learned 
Unitarian,  Dr.  James  Drummond,  Principal  of  Manchester  New  College, 
London,  in  a  Paper  published  by  him  in  the  Theological  Review,  April, 
1877.  In  connexion  with  this  may  be  read  a  Lecture  on  Philo,  published 
by  him  in  the  same  year,  and  since  enlarged  into  a  treatise  in  two 
volumes,  1888.  Dr.  Drummond  conclusively  establishes  the  depen 
dence  of  Justin's  doctrine  on  St.  John's,  of  which  internal  evidence 
shows  it  to  be  a  later  development.  '  Not  only  is  every  point  in  the 
Johannine  doctrine  contained  in  Justin's,  but  almost  every  portion  of  it  is 
presented  with  amplifications ;  its  ambiguous  statements  are  resolved  into 
the  requisite  number  of  definite  propositions,  and  questions  which  it  sug 
gests,  and  does  not  answer,  are  dogmatically  settled.'  The  same  Paper 
contains  an  excellent  enumeration  of  verbal  coincidences  between  Justin 
and  the  fourth  Gospel.  Of  these,  one  which  Dr.  Drummond  has  himself 
added  to  the  list  of  those  previously  observed  has  special  interest  for  me, 
on  account  of  its  turning  on  an  interpretation  of  John  xix.  13,  which  many 
years  ago  I  had  been  in  the  habit  of  hearing  maintained  by  Archbishop 
Whately.  He  held  that,  in  the  phrase  e«a0t(rej>  fvl  ^TJ^CCTOS,  the  verb 


VI.]  JUSTIN   MARTYR.  75 

their  mothers'  wombs  is  manifest  to  all.'  I  am  sure  it  is 
equally  manifest  to  all  that  there  is  here  striking  coincidence, 
with  the  discourse  with  Nicodemus  recorded  by  St.  John. 

Now  let  me  add  a  word  as  to  the  cumulative  effect  of 
Justin's  doctrinal  agreements  with  St.  John,  and  his  verbal 
agreements  of  which  this  is  a  specimen.  His  doctrine  is  in 
perfect  harmony  with  St.  John,  and  we  are  puzzled  to  say  from 
what  other  source  he  could  have  derived  it.  There  are  also  a 
number  of  verbal  echoes  of  St.  John,  not  indeed  exact,  but 
very  closely  reproducing  him.  If  Justin  used  St.  John,  every 
thing  is  explained  :  you  may  try  to  find  some  hypothesis 
which  will  account  for  one  sort  of  agreements,  and  some 
hypothesis  which  will  account  for  the  other ;  but  how  violent 
the  improbability  that  both  hypotheses  shall  be  true.  In  the 
present  case,  when  we  ask  where  Justin  found  these  words  of 
Christ,  '  Except  ye  be  born  again,  ye  shall  not  enter  into  the 
kingdom  of  heaven,'  we  are  inclined  to  laugh  at  the  special 
pleading  which  answers  us,  Surely  not  in  St.  John.  Justin 
says,  '  except  ye  be  born  again' ;  St.  John,  '  except  a  man  be 
born  again.'  Justin  says, '  the  kingdom  of  heaven ' ;  St.  John, 
'the  kingdom  of  God.'*  And  we  are  referred,  as  the  more 
probable  original  of  Justin's  quotation,  to  St.  Matthew 
(xviii.  3),  'Except  ye  become  as  little  children  ye  shall  not 
enter  the  kingdom  of  heaven.'  But  what,  then,  about  the 
following  sentence  as  to  the  impossibility  of  again  entering 


to  be  understood  transitively,  as  in  I  Cor.  vi.  4  ;  Eph.  i.  20. 
Then  the  translation  would  run :  '  Pilate  brought  Jesus  forth,  seated  him 
on  the  judgment-seat,  .  .  .  and  saith  unto  the  Jews,  Behold  your 
King.'  That  is  to  say,  Pilate  in  presenting  Jesus  to  the  Jews  as  their 
King,  seats  Him,  with  mock  reverence,  in  his  own  judgment-seat.  Now 
Dr.  Drummond  points  out  that  Justin  (Apol.  i.  35),  has  Siaffvpovres  avrbv 
fKaOiffav  firl  ^rj^aros  Kal  elTrov,  Kptvov  yfjuv.  Except  for  the  change  of  the 
singular  into  the  plural,  Justin's  phrase  is  identical  with  St.  John's.  It 
seems  a  reasonable  inference  that  Justin  read  the  verse  in  St.  John,  and 
that  he  there  understood  the  verb  transitively. 

*  Dr.  Ezra  Abbot  shows  that  Justin  has  the  company  of  several  sub 
sequent  Fathers  in  every  one  of  his  variations  from  St.  John.  He  gives 
references  to  nine  passages  where  Jeremy  Taylor  (who  is  not  supposed  to 
have  used  apocryphal  Gospels)  quotes  the  text ;  none  of  the  quotations 
agreeing  with  St.  John,  and  only  two  with  each  other.  And  he  remarks 
that  the  English  Book  of  Common  Prayer,  which  twice  quotes  the  text, 
in  neither  case  agrees  with  St.  John.  The  late  Irish  revisers  have  been  so 
punctilious  as  to  correct  this  irregularity. 


76  THE    GOSPELS    TN   THE    EARLY   CHURCH.  [vi. 

our  mother's  womb  ?  Is  this  but  a  chance  thought  which 
occurred  to  Justin  and  to  St.  John  independently  ? 

It  may  be  well,  however,  not  to  omit  to  notice  one  of 
Strauss' s  supposed  proofs,  that  Justin  did  not  use  the  dialogue 
with  Nicodemus,  because  the  argument  has  recoiled  on  him 
self.  A  reference  to  this  same  passage  in  John  is  found  also 
in  the  Clementine  Homilies  (Horn.  xi.  26),  of  which  I  made 
mention  in  a  previous  Lecture.  The  quotation  is,  like  Justin's, 
inexact;  and  though  it  does  not  verbally  agree  with  Justin's 
either,  it  agrees  with  him  in  this  point,  that  both  use  the 
second  person  plural,*  '  except  ye  be  born  again,'  while  St. 
John  says, '  except  a  man  be  born  again.'  Hence  it  was  argued 
that  Justin  and  the  Clementines  both  drew  the  idea,  not  from 
St.  John,  but  from  some  other  common  source.  Now,  the 
Clementines  contained  other  apparent  proofs  of  acquaintance 
with  St.  John's  Gospel,  as,  for  instance,  that  they  attribute  to 
Jesus  the  sayings,  '  I  am  the  door,'  and  '  My  sheep  hear  My 
voice.'  (Horn.  iii.  52).  But  the  Tubingen  writers  expended 
their  ingenuity  to  prove  that  this  coincidence  in  language 
was  only  accidental,  and  their  cardinal  argument  was  that  the 
author  of  the  Clementines  could  not  have  used  the  fourth  Gos 
pel.  He  was,  as  I  have  already  said,  an  Ebionite  ;  John,  on 
the  contrary,  the  most  anti-Jewish  of  New  Testament  writers. 
The  Clementine  writer,  therefore,  could  not  have  accepted  a 
book  so  opposed  to  his  tendency;  and,  if  he  had  known  it, 
would  have  cited  it  only  to  combat  it. 

While  this  dispute  was  going  on,  a  manuscript  was  dis 
covered,  containing  a  completef  copy  of  the  twenty  Clemen 
tine  Homilies — for  the  manuscript  previously  known  was 
defective,  breaking  off  in  the  middle  of  the  nineteenth — and 
lo,  in  the  newly-recovered  part  of  the  nineteenth,  we  read, 
4  Our  Lord  answered  to  those  who  asked  Him,  "  Is  it  he  who 
hath  sinned,  or  his  parents,  that  he  was  born  blind?"  — 
"  Neither  hath  this  man  sinned  nor  his  parents  ;  but  that 
through  him  might  be  manifested  the  power  of  God,  which 
heals  sins  of  ignorance." '  There  are  verbal  differences  of 
quotation  here,  but  only  a  few  of  our  adversaries  have,  as  yet, 

*  Not  so,  however,  in  the  parallel  passage  (Recog.  vi.  9). 
t  The  work  was  first  published  complete  by  Dressel,  in  1853. 


VI.]  JUSTIN   MARTYR.  77 

mustered  courage  to  make  them  a  ground  for  denying  that 
it  is  a  quotation.* 

Now,  it  being  thus  proved  that  the  Clementine  writer 
acknowledged  the  fourth  Gospel,  the  argument  which  had 
been  used  by  the  deniers  of  this  fact  recoils  on  them  with 
immense  force — namely,  the  argument  founded  on  the  diame 
trical  opposition  between  the  views  of  the  Clementine  author 
and  of  the  Evangelist.  Ebionites  would  not  easily  accept  a 
work  proceeding  from  quite  an  opposite  school,  if  it  were  one 
of  modern  origin,  or  if  there  were  any  reasonable  pretext  for 
denying  its  apostolic  authority.  The  conclusion  follows  that,, 
at  the  time  of  the  composition  of  the  Clementines,  which 
some  place  as  early  as  the  year  i6o,f  the  authority  of  St. 
John's  Gospel  was  so  universally  recognized  in  the  Church  by 
men  of  all  parties,  and  dated  so  far  back,  that  no  suspicion 
occurred  to  men  strongly  interested  in  rejecting  the  book  if 
they  could  have  ventured  to  do  so.  Thus  the  Clementines,  to 
which  Strauss  referred  us,  prove  that,  in  the  time  when  Justin 
lived,  he  could  hardly  help  being  acquainted  with  the  fourth 
Gospel ;  so  that  there  is  no  reason  whatever  for  not  drawing 
the  obvious  inferences  from  those  passages  in  his  writings 
which  are  on  the  face  of  them  quotations  from  it. 

I  have  not  time  to  speak  of  Justin's  Eucharistic  doctrine,  nor 
of  a  number  of  verbal  coincidences  with  John  ;  but  must 
repeat  that  the  critics  who  deny  Justin's  use  of  the  fourth 

*  Among  those  who  had  this  courage  was  the  author  of  '  Supernatural 
Religion '  ;  but  Hilgenfeld  (who,  in  a  review  of  this  work  (Zeitschrift, 
1875,  582),  pronounces  that  this  author  exhibits  as  much  partiality  against 
as  do  the  orthodox  for  the  received  acceptation  of  the  Gospels),  declares 
here  that  it  will  be  difficult  to  find  anyone  in  Germany  or  Switzerland  to 
believe  that  the  Clementine  writer  is  independent  of  St.  John — '  In 
Deutschland  und  der  Schweiz  wird  es  kaum  jemand  glauben  dass  Clem. 
Horn.  xix.  22  von  Joh.  ix.  1-3  unabhanging  sein  sollte.'  Renan,  whose 
memory  seems  to  have  failed  him  a  good  deal  in  the  composition  of  his 
later  volumes,  states  (vi.  73)  that  the  author  of  the  Pseudo-Clementine 
Homilies  did  not  know  the  fourth  Gospel,  and  in  the  same  volume  (p.  500) 
that  he  knew  all  four.  The  explanation  probably  is,  that  Renan  in 
the  two  places  was  relying  on  different  authorities,  one  of  whom  wrote 
before,  the  other  after,  the ,  discovery  of  the  conclusion  of  the  nineteenth 
Homily. 

t  I  am  myself  willing  to  accept  so  early  a  date  only  for  the  discourses 
of  Peter  against  the  heathen,  which  were  the  basis  of  the  work,  and  which 
seem  to  me  to  have  been  used  in  180  by  Theophilus  of  Antioch  (ad  Autol. 
i.  10  ;  cf.  Clem.  Horn.  x.  it> ;  Recog.  v.  20). 


78  THE   GOSPELS   IN   THE   EARLY   CHURCH.  [vi. 

Gospel  seem  to  have  no  conception  of  the  cumulative  force 
of  evidence.  After  giving  a  forced  explanation  of  one  of 
these  coincidences,  they  go  on  to  explain  away  another,  and 
another  after  that,  without  ever  reflecting  that  it  is  necessary 
for  the  success  of  their  argument  that  every  one  of  these  ex 
planations  should  be  correct  ;  and  that  if  there  are  chances 
against  the  correctness  of  each  one  of  them,  the  chances 
against  the  correctness  of  the  entire  series  must  be  enormous. 
I  will  only  add  that  Justin  used  not  only  St.  John's  Gospel, 
but  also  his  First  Epistle.  This  is  shown  by  a  coincidence 
which  seems  to  me  to  afford  decisive  proof.  In  i  John,  iii.  i, 
the  four  oldest  manuscripts,  well  confirmed  by  other  evidence, 
add  to  the  received  text  the  words  /cat  eoyxeV  —  '  Behold  what 
manner  of  love  the  Father  hath  bestowed  on  us,  that  we 
should  be  called  the  sons  of  God  ;  and  such  we  are'  This 
reading  is  accordingly  adopted  by  all  recent  critical  editors. 
Now,  Justin  has  (Dial.  123)  KOL  Otov  re'/cra  dXrjOiva 


*  One  of  the  latest  essays  on  Justin's  use  of  St.  John  is  by  Dr.  Edwin 
A.  Abbott,  Master  of  the  City  of  London  School  (Modern  Review,  1882, 
pp.  559,  716).  Dr.  Abbott  adopts  Thoma's  theory,  only  in  a  less  prob 
able  form.  He  does  not  deny  that  Justin  may  have  been  acquainted  with 
St.  John's  Gospel,  but  he  denies  that  he  valued  it,  or,  indeed,  that  he  ever 
used  it.  A  number  of  coincidences  are  explained  away  one  after  another. 
In  some  cases  Justin  is  drawing  directly  from  Philo,  in  others  from 
Christian  disciples  of  Philo,  or  he  is  using  traditions  which  were  also 
known  to  the  fourth  Evangelist.  The  saying  about  entering  into  the 
mother's  womb  referred,  no  doubt,  to  a  stock  objection  made  by  heathens 
to  Christian  missionaries,  who  spoke  to  them  of  the  necessity  of  a  new 
birth  and  of  becoming  like  little  children.  It  seems  to  me  that,  however 
difficult  it  might  have  been  to  resist  the  cumulative  force  of  so  many 
coincidences,  Dr.  Abbott  would  have  done  better  for  his  theory  if  he  had 
avoided  making  the  fatal  concession  that  Justin  might  have  known  the 
fourth  Gospel.  For  then  we  have  a  vera  causa  which  at  once  accounts 
for  his  coincidences  with  it,  and  it  becomes  unscientific  in  the  last  degree 
to  invent  imaginary  disciples  of  Philo  or  unrecorded  traditions  in  order  to 
explain  what  can  be  perfectly  well  explained  without  any  such  hypothesis. 
If  any  author  of  the  present  day  presented  as  many  coincidences  with  a 
previous  writer,  he  would  be  laughed  to  scorn  by  his  reviewers  if,  while 
he  had  to  own  that  he  had  seen  the  previous  book,  he  denied  that  he 
valued  it  or  had  used  it. 

Thoma's  question,  If  Justin  valued  the  fourth  Gospel,  why  did  he  not 
use  it  more  ?  has  been  so  well  answered  by  Dr.  Drummond  and  by  Dr.  Ezra 
Abbot,  that  a  man  must  be  argument-proof  who  repeats  the  question 
after  reading  what  they  have  said.  It  seems  to  me  clear  that,  if  Justin 
knew  the  fourth  Gospel,  he  used  it,  and  that  copiously  ;  if  he  used  it,  he 
valued  it,  for  his  whole  theological  system  is  founded  on  it.  If  he 


VI.]  JUSTIN   MARTYR.  79 

Kenan's  vacillations  on  the  subject  of  St.  John's  Gospel  are 
extraordinary.  In  the  preface  to  his  first  volume  (p.  xxv.)  he 
gives  a  summary,  endorsing  the  conclusions  which  I  have 
presented  for  your  acceptance  :  — '  Nobody  doubts  that, 
towards  the  year  150,  the  fourth  Gospel  existed,  and  was  as 
cribed  to  John.  Formal  citations  by  St.  Justin  (Apol.  i.  32, 
6 1  ;  Dial.  88) ;  by  Athenagoras  (Legal.  40) ;  by  Tatian  (Adv. 
Graec.  $,7\cf.  Euseb.  H.  E.,  iv.  29  ;  Theodoret,  Haer.  Fab.  i. 
20) ;  by  Theophilus  of  Antioch  (ad.  Autol.  ii.  22) ;  by  Irenaeus 
(n.  xxii.  5  ;  iii.  i  ;  cf.  Euseb.  H.  E.,\.  8),  show  this  Gospel,  from 
that  time  forward,  mingling  in  all  controversies,  and  serving 
as  a  corner-stone  in  the  development  of  dogma.  Irenaeus  is 
express :  now  Irenaeus  came  out  of  the  school  of  John,  and 
between  him  and  the  Apostle  there  was  only  Polycarp.  The 
part  played  by  our  Gospel  in  Gnosticism,  and  in  particular  in 
the  system  of  Valentinus  (Iren.  i.  iii.  6;  in.  xi.  7;  Hippol. 
Philosoph.  vi.  ii.  29,  &c.),  in  Montanism  (Iren.  in.  xi.  9),  and 
in  the  Quarto-deciman  dispute  (Euseb.  H.  E.,  v.  24),  is  not 
less  decisive.  The  school  of  John  is  that  whose  influence 

adopted  the  fourth  Evangelist  as  his  theological  instructor,  he  must  have 
admitted  the  claims  which  that  Evangelist  implicitly  makes  for  himself, 
and  which  were  acknowledged  all  over  the  Christian  world  within  thirty 
years  of  Justin's  time. 

Dr.  Abbott's  views  are  most  eccentric  when  he  treats  of  the  Gnostic 
use  of  St.  John's  Gospel.  He  admits  that  it  was  a  favourite  with  the 
Valentinians,  but  he  thinks  that  to  be  a  reason  why  it  could  not  have 
been  a  favourite  with  Justin,  who  opposed  these  heretics.  He  owns  that 
it  was  used  by  Tatian,  but  he  thinks  that  must  have  been  after  Justin's 
death,  and  when  Tatian  had  become  a  Gnostic.  He  does  not  seem  to 
have  studied  the  links  by  which  Tatian's  apologetic  work  is  doubly  con 
nected  with  Justin  and  with  the  fourth  Gospel.  Finally,  when  called  on 
to  explain  how  this  Gospel,  in  such  favour  with  the  Gnostics,  but  rejected 
by  their  orthodox  opponent,  came  into  equal  favour  with  the  Catholics  also, 
and  that  so  rapidly,  that  all  traces  of  hesitation  have  been  obliterated 
except  what  may  be  discovered  in  Justin ;  Dr.  Abbott  replies  that  the 
success  was  due  'to  the  intrinsic  power  of  this  most  spiritual  treatise,' 
'  because  it  truthfully  protested  against  the  thaumaturgic  tendencies  of 
the  Church,  by  exhibiting  Jesus  principally  as  a  worker  of  spiritual,  and 
not  material,  marvels.'  This  seems  undeserved  praise  to  give  to  the 
narrator  of  the  healing  of  the  man  born  blind,  and  of  the  raising  of 
Lazarus  ;  nor  does  it  seem  a  satisfactory  explanation  to  say  that  a  heretical 
book  won  the  favour  of  the  Church  by  reason  of  its  protest  against  the 
tendencies  of  the  Church.  In  my  judgment,  a  critic  who  cannot  divest 
himself  of  the  anti-supernaturalist  feelings  of  the  nineteenth  century  is  not 
one  who  can  enter  into  the  mind  of  the  second  century,  and  is  no  com 
petent  judge  what  arguments  a  writer  of  that  date  would  have  been  likely 
to  use. 


80  THE   GOSPELS   IN   THE   EARLY   CHURCH.  [vi. 

can  be  most  distinctly  traced  in  the  second  century ;  but  that 
school  cannot  be  explained  unless  we  place  the  fourth  Gospel 
at  its  very  cradle.  Let  us  add,  that  the  first  Epistle  ascribed 
to  John  is  certainly  by  the  same  author  as  the  fourth  Gospel.* 
Now,  that  Epistle  is  recognized  as  John's  by  Polycarp  (ad 
Philipp.  7),  by  Papias  (Euseb.,  H.  E.  iii.  39,  40),  and  by  Ire- 
naeus  (in.  xvi.  5,  8  ;  Euseb.,  H.  E.  v.  8).' 

During  the  interval,  however,  between  the  publication  of 
his  first  volume  and  his  sixth,  Renan  appears  to  have  received 
a  revelation  (for  he  makes  no  pretence  of  offering  a  proof)  that 
the  fourth  Gospel  was  unknown  to  several  of  those  whom  he 
had  already  cited  as  authorities.!  He  assures  his  readers,  as 
a  positive  fact  (vi.  73),  that  neither  Papias  nor  Justin,  nor  the 
Pseudo-Clementines,  nor  Marcion,  were  acquainted  with  the 
fourth  Gospel ;  and  he  suggests  that  the  Evangelist  must  have 
taken  some  pains  not  to  let  his  Gospel  be  seen  by  those  who 
would  know  that  it  did  not  come  from  John.  Renan  owns 
(p.  69)  that  Justin  has  a  theory  of  the  Logos  analogous  to  that 
of  'the  Pseudo-John,'  and  he  refers  to  Apol.  i.  23,  32  ;  ii.  6, 
10,  13;  Dial.  61,  62,  70,  98,  100,  102,  105,  127;  but  we  are 
on  no  account  to  believe  that  Justin  derived  this  theory  from 
the  fourth  Gospel.  He  tells  us  (p.  503)  that  Tatian  did  not 
know,  or  did  not  admit,  the  fourth  Gospel  ;  that  it  is  wrong 
to  think  that  Tatian's  '  Diatessaron  '  commenced  with  '  In 
the  beginning  was  the  Word';  wrong  to  think  that  this  title 
implied  the  four  Canonical  Gospels.  It  is  a  term  borrowed 
from  Greek  music,  and  only  implies  perfect  harmony.  The 
Synoptics,  the  Gospel  of  the  Hebrews,  and  the  Gospel  of 
Peter,  were  the  basis  of  this  harmony.  I  shall  speak  pre 
sently  of  Tatian,  and  you  will  then  know  why  Renan  was 
obliged  entirely  to  alter  in  his  seventh  volume  the  account 
he  had  given  of  the  'Diatessaron'  in  his  sixth.  But  Renan's 
perplexity  rises  to  its  height  when  (p.  129)  he  speaks  of 
Papias,  of  whom  I  shall  treat  in  the  next  Lecture,  and  when 
he  tries  to  account  for  the  '  singular  fact '  that  '  Papias,  who 


*  T  John,  i.  3,  5.  'The  two  writings  offer  the  most  complete  identity 
of  style,  the  same  terms,  the  same  favourite  expressions'  (Renan's  note). 

f  Accordingly,  I  find  that  the  passage  cited  above  has  been  modified  in 
later  editions. 


VI.  J  TATIAN.  8 1 

does  not  know  the  fourth  Gospel,  should  know  the  Epistle 
falsely  ascribed  to  John.'  After  some  lame  attempts  at  ex 
planation,  he  exclaims,  '  One  can  never  touch  the  question 
of  the  writings  ascribed  to  John  without  falling  into  contra 
dictions  and  anomalies.'  But  there  would  have  been  neither 
contradiction  nor  anomaly  if  Renan  had  remained  content 
with  the  statement  of  evidence  given  in  his  first  volume. 

To  return  to  Justin :  we  are  happily  able  to  bridge  over 
the  interval  between  him  and  Irenaeus  by  means  of  Justin's 
pupil,  Tatian  the  Assyrian.  It  is  related  that  Tatian  was  con 
verted  by  Justin ;  and  in  Tatian's  apologetic  work,  the 
'  Address  to  the  Greeks,'  Justin  is  spoken  of  with  high  ad 
miration.*  On  the  other  hand,  after  Justin's  death,  Tatian 
joined  himself  to  one  of  those  ascetic  sects  which  condemned 
both  marriage  and  the  use  of  wine  and  flesh  meat  as  abso 
lutely  unlawful  to  a  Christian .f  And  he  is  said  to  have  held 
some  other  heretical  opinions  besides.  Irenaeus  has  a  chap 
ter  on  the  heresy  of  Tatian,  and  he  speaks  of  him  in  the  past 
tense  in  a  way  which  conveys  the  idea  that  he  was  dead,  and 
his  teaching  over,  at  the  time  Irenaeus  wrote.  Clement  of 
Alexandria  tells  us  that  one  of  his  own  teachers  was  an 
Assyrian,  and  it  has  been  very  commonly  thought  that  this 
was  Tatian.  Thus  we  see  that  Tatian  comes  midway  between 
Justin  Martyr  and  the  age  of  Irenaeus  and  Clement.  Now, 
when  we  take  up  Tatian's  apologetic  work  already  mentioned, 
we  find  at  the  outset  a  statement  of  Logos  doctrine  near  akin 
to  Justin's  ;  while  Tatian's  use  of  St.  John  is  evinced  by 
some  distinct  quotations — *  All  things  were  made  by  him,  and 
without  him  was  not  anything  made,'  '  This  is  the  saying, 
"The  darkness  comprehendeth  not  the  light," '  and  '  God  is 
a  Spirit.'  Thus  Tatian  gives  distinct  confirmation  to  the 
conclusion  we  already  arrived  at  as  to  the  derivation  of 

*  Zahn  gives  some  probable  reasons  for  dating  this  work  not  later  than 
161  (Forschungen  i.,  279.) 

f  It  is  necessary  to  bear  in  mind  this  special  feature  of  Tatian's  heresy 
in  order  to  appreciate  the  merits  of  Dr.  Abbott's  suggestion  that,  after 
Tatian  had  come  to  think  it  a  sin  to  marry  or  to  drink  wine,  the  2nd  chapter 
of  St.  John's  Gospel  began  to  have  an  attraction  for  him  which  it  did  not 
possess  in  the  days  of  his  orthodoxy.  Plainly,  no  Encratite  would  receive 
the  fourth  Gospel  unless,  before  embracing  his  heresy,  he  had  been  so 
long  in  the  habit  of  using  that  Gospel  that  he  could  not  then  give  it  up. 

G 


82  THE   GOSPELS    IN    THE    EARLY   CHURCH.  [vi. 

Justin's  Logos  doctrine  from  St.  John.  But  Tatian  also 
enables  us  to  settle  the  question  raised  by  Thoma,  If  Justin 
knew  St.  John,  did  he  put  it  on  an  equality  with  the  Synoptic 
Gospels  ? 

I  have  already  said  that  the  earliest  commentary  on  a  New 
Testament  book  of  which  we  have  knowledge  is  by  a  heretic, 
Heracleon ;  and  I  have  now  to  add  that  it  was  also  a  heretic, 
Tatian,  who  appears  to  have  been  the  first  to  make  a  harmony 
of  the  Gospels.  Eusebius  tells  us  that  Tatian  made  a  com 
bination  of  the  Gospels,  and  that  he  called  it  '  Diatessaron,'* 
which,  being  a  recognized  musical  term,  answers  in  some  sort 
to  what  we  call  a  harmony.  Sceptical  critics  have  made 
enormous  efforts  to  escape  the  inferences  suggested  by  the 
use  of  the  name  *  Diatessaron ' — viz.,  that  the  harmony  was 
based  on  four  Gospels,  and  that  these  were  the  four  which  we 
know  were,  in  the  next  generation,  regarded  as  holding  a 
place  of  divinely  ordained  pre-eminence.  It  is  unnecessary 
for  me  to  state  the  reasons  which  first  led  me  to  pronounce 
these  efforts  to  have  utterly  failed,  because  recent  discoveries 
have  since  given  them  a  decisive  refutation. 

Tatian's  arrangement  of  the  Gospel  history  obtained  very 
large  circulation,  which  amounts  to  saying  that  it  found  ac 
ceptance  with  the  orthodox  ;  for  the  followers  of  Tatian  in 
his  heretical  opinions  were  very  few.  The  use  of  the  *  Diates 
saron  '  at  Edessa  is  mentioned  in  an  apocryphal  Syriac  book, 

*  The  following  note  on  the  musical  term  5t&  reffaapwv  has  been  given 
me  by  my  friend  Professor  Mahaffy  : — 

'  Among  the  old  Greeks  only  the  octave  (8m  irafftav),  the  fifth  (5ta  ireWe), 
and  the  fourth  (Sia  reffffdpwv),  were  recognized  as  concords  (avutyuvoi 
Qdoyyol) ,  whereas  the  rest  of  the  intervals  are  called  discords  (8id(f)wvoi). 
This  definition  of  concord,  excluding  thirds,  which  are  now  accepted  as 
the  simplest  and  easiest  case,  arises  from  Pythagoras'  discovery,  that  if, 
of  two  equal  strings,  one  be  stopped  at  points  dividing  the  string  in  the 
ratios  of  I  :  2  ;  2:3;  and  3  :  4,  the  octave,  fifth,  and  fourth  above  the 
sister  string  are  produced.  Hence  he  regarded  these  intervals  as  perfect 
concords,  and  this  opinion  was  general  till  the  time  of  Des  Cartes,  who 
first  boldly  asserted  that  thirds  were  concords.  It  may  be  added  that, 
even  now,  most  of  the  major  thirds  we  hear  are  less  than  two  whole  tones 
apart.  This  interval,  when  strictly  produced,  sounds  like  a  sharp  third, 
and  is  disagreeable.  The  difficulty  is  avoided  by  the  temperament  in  our 
tuning.' 

From  this  explanation  it  is  seen  to  be  improper  to  treat  the  phrase 
'  Diatessaron '  as  one  merely  denoting  harmony,  and  not  implying  any 


VI.]  T  ATI  AN.  83 

probably  written  about  the  middle  of  the  third  century.* 
Theodoret  (Haer.  Fab.  i.  20),  writing  in  the  middle  of  the 
fifth  century,  bears  witness  to  the  still  extensive  use  of  it, 
apparently  in  the  public  Church  reading  of  his  own  diocese 
(Cyrus,  near  the  Euphrates) ;  and  states  that  he  found  more 
than  two  hundred  copies  in  use  in  the  churches  of  his  district, 
which  he  took  away,  and  replaced  by  copies  of  the  four 
Gospels.  The  work  of  substituting  a  single  narrative  for  our 
four  would  naturally  involve  many  omissions  from  the  text  of 
our  Gospels,  and  it  would  seem  to  be  this  mutilation  of  the 
sacred  text  which  brought  Tatian's  work  into  disrepute.  At 
least  Theodoret  censures  it  for  cutting  out  the  genealogies 
and  other  passages  which  show  that  our  Lord  was  born  of  the 
seed  of  David  after  the  flesh  ;  and  he  implies,  though  perhaps 
the  imputation  is  undeserved,  that  Tatian  had  a  heretical 
object  in  this  mutilation.  A  harmony  not  open  to  this 
objection  was  made,  in  the  third  century,  by  Ammonius  of 
Alexandria.  He  took  St.  Matthew's  Gospel  as  the  basis  of 
his  work,  and  put  side  by  side  with  St.  Matthew  the  parallel 
passages  from  other  Gospels.  We  learn  this  from  a  letter  of 
Eusebius  (Epist.  ad  Carpianum}  prefatory  to  his  own  improved 
way  of  harmonizing  the  Gospels — the  Eusebian  Canons — 
which  will  come  under  our  consideration  later. 

To  return  to  Tatian  :  the  strongest  proof  of  the  orthodox 
use  of  his  harmony  is  that  the  most  famous  of  the  native 
Syrian  fathers,  Ephraem  of  Edessa,  who  died  in  373,  wrote  a 

particular  number  of  Gospels.  We  see  also  that,  since  the  phrase  denotes, 
not  a  harmony  of  four,  but  a  concord  between  the  first  and  fourth  terms 
of  a  series,  it  was  used  improperly  by  Tatian,  unless  his  work  had  been  one 
on  the  relations  between  the  Evangelists  Matthew  and  John.  But  strict 
propriety  of  language  is  rare  when  terms  of  art  are  used  metaphorically  by 
outsiders. 

My  friend  Dr.  Quarry  has  given  me  the  curious  information  that  Dia- 
tessaron  is  not  only  a  musical  but  a  medical  term.  It  denoted  a  plaister 
made  of  four  ingredients ;  the  Diapente  was  another  common  plaister 
made  of  five  (Caelins  Aurelianus,  iv.  7,  vol.  ii.  p.  331  :  ed.  Haller,  1774). 
See  also  Galen,  De  compositione  medicament,  per  genera,  v.  p.  157,  Leip 
zig,  1827.  Dr.  Quarry  thinks  that  a  well-known  blunder  made  by  Victor 
of  Capua,  in  writing  Diapente  where  he  ought  to  have  written  Diatessaron, 
is  a  confusion  more  likely  to  have  arisen  from  the  common  use  of  the 
words  as  medical  than  as  musical  terms ;  the  former  use  being  popular  at 
the  time  in  question,  the  latter  then  confined  to  a  few. 

*  Phillips,  Doctrine  of  Addai,  p.  34. 

G  2 


84  THE    GOSPELS   IN    THE    EARLY   CHURCH.  [vi. 

commentary  on  the  '  Diatessaron,'  apparently  as  if  it  were  the 
version  of  the  New  Testament  then  in  ecclesiastical  use.  This 
fact  till  lately  rested  on  the  testimony  of  a  rather  late  Syrian 
writer,  Dionysius  Bar-Salibi,  who  wrote  towards  the  end  of 
the  twelfth  century,  and  who  gives  the  further  information 
that  the  harmony  commenced,  '  In  the  beginning  was  the 
Word,'  which  would  place  Tatian's  use  of  St.  John's  Gospel 
beyond  doubt.  You  can  well  imagine  that  sceptical  critics 
made  every  effort  to  set  aside  testimony  which  would  force  on 
them  so  unwelcome  a  conclusion.  Bishop  Lightfoot,  in  an 
article  in  the  Contemporary  Review  (May,  1877),  convincingly 
showed  that  the  attempts  to  break  down  the  testimony  of 
Bar-Salibi  had  been  utterly  unsuccessful.  But  since  then  the 
question  has  assumed  a  new  aspect,  by  the  substantial  re 
covery  of  the  very  work  of  Ephraem  Syrus  which  Bar-Salibi 
described.  It  comes  to  us,  indeed,  in  a  roundabout  way. 
The  common  opinion  has  been  that  Tatian's  harmony  was 
originally  written  in  Greek,  and  so  the  Greek  name  '  Diates 
saron'  would  lead  us  to  suppose.  Zahn*  has  lately  taken  a 
good  deal  of  pains  to  maintain  that  the  original  language  was 
Syriac,  and  it  is  certain  that  the  Diatessaron  had  considerable 
circulation  in  Syriac-speaking  countries,  and  apparently  very 
little  where  Greek  was  spoken.f  However  that  may  be,  if  it 
had  been  originally  Greek,  it  had  been  translated  into  Syriac, 
and  had  come  into  use  in  Syriac-speaking  churches  before 
Ephraem  commented  on  it.  This  commentary  of  Ephraem 
is  extant  in  an  Armenian  translation,  apparently  of  the  fifth 


*  Tatian's  Diatessaron,  Erlangen,  1881.  Zahn  is  Professor  of  Theo 
logy  at  Leipzig,  and  belongs  to  the  Conservative  school. 

f  Baethgen  maintained  the  somewhat  startling  thesis  that  the  '  Diates 
saron'  was  the  earliest  form  in  which  the  Gospel  history  became  known 
to  Syriac-speaking  people  (' Evangelienfragmente,''  Leipzig,  1885.)  His 
view  has  been  adopted  by  Zahn,  who  now  holds  that  Tatian  returning 
from  the  West  to  his  native  Edessa,  gave  the  Syriac-speaking  people  their 
first  history  of  our  Lord's  life  in  their  own  tongue,  in  the  form  of  a  single 
Gospel,  framed  by  combining  the  Greek  four.  Zahn  holds  that  the 
Diatessaron  continued  for  more  than  a  century  to  be  the  only  Gospel 
known  to  Syriac-speaking  people ;  and  he  accounts  for  the  affinities  that 
have  been  noticed  between  the  Diatessaron  and  the  Syriac  version  pub 
lished  by  Dr.  Cureton,  by  the  supposition  that  those  who  first  translated 
the  entire  Greek  Gospels  into  Syriac  were  influenced  by  the  phraseology 
of  the  Diatessaron  with  which  they  were  familiar.  If  Zahn's  speculations 


VI.]  TATIAN.  85 

century,  and  was  actually  published  in  that  language  by  the 
Mechitarist  Fathers,  at  Venice,  so  long  ago  as  1836.  But  in 
the  obscurity  of  that  language  it  remained  unknown  to 
Western  scholars  until  a  Latin  translation  of  it  was  published 
by  Moesinger,  in  1876,  and  it  took  three  or  four  years  more 
before  the  publication  attracted  much  attention.*  That  this 
work  is  Ephraem's  I  think  there  can  be  no  reasonable  doubt. 
It  consists  of  a  series  of  homiletic  notes,  and  these  (as  we  had 
been  led  to  expect)  not  following  the  order  of  any  one  of  our 
Gospels,  but  passing  from  one  to  another :  in  other  words, 
the  commentary  is  on  a  narrative  framed  by  putting  together 
passages  from  different  Gospels.  The  commentary  enables 
us  to  reconstruct,  at  least  in  its  substance,  the  text  which  was 
commented  on.  I  say  'in  its  substance/  because  we  cannot 
infer  with  certainty  that  a  verse  was  absent  from  the  harmony 
because  it  is  not  commented  on  by  Ephraem,  it  being  possible 
that  he  found  nothing  in  the  verse  on  which  he  thought  it  ne 
cessary  to  remark ;  nor,  again,  can  we  infer  that  a  verse  was 
present  in  the  harmony  because  Ephraem,  commenting  on  a 
different  verse,  refers  to  it,  since  Ephraem  was  no  doubt 
familiar,  not  only  with  the  harmony  on  which  he  commented, 
but  with  the  full  text  of  the  four  Gospels.  But  although,  for 
the  reasons  I  have  indicated,  we  cannot  pretend  to  be  exact 
in  every  detail,  we  can  recover  the  general  outline  of  the  text 
commented  on. 

We   have  important  helps  in  the  work  of  reconstruction. 
In  the  year  543  Victor  of  Capua  found  a  Latin  harmony  of 


as  to  the  Latin  translation  be  correct,  Tatian  would  deserve  the  honour  of 
being  the  first  to  make  a  vernacular  translation  of  any  part  of  the  New 
Testament.  But  it  seems  to  me  very  improbable  that  the  idea  of  trans 
lating  into  Syriac  would  have  occurred  to  Tatian  if  he  had  not  already  in 
the  West  known  of  Latin  translations.  It  would,  however,  be  beside  my 
present  purpose  to  discuss  the  interesting  questions  suggested  in  this  note. 
All  that  we  are  here  concerned  with  is,  that  it  has  been  put  beyond  con 
troversy  that  Tatian  acknowledged  our  four  Gospels  as  the  primary  sources 
of  a  knowledge  of  the  Saviour's  life. 

*  The  first  formal  account  of  it  was  given  by  Harnack  in  the  Zeitschrift 
fur  Kirchengeschichte,  1 88 1.  He  had  previously,  in  the  same  journal,  for 
1879,  p.  401,  given  a  reference  to  the  book  without  explaining  its  nature. 
The  book  was  more  largely  referred  to  by  Dr.  Ezra  Abbot,  in  America, 
in  his  Authorship  of  the  Fourth  Gospel,  1880.  The  first  detailed  account 
-of  it  in  England  was  given  by  Dr.  Wace  in  articles  in  The  Expositor^  1882. 


86  THE    GOSPELS    IN   THE    EARLY   CHURCH.  [vi. 

the  Gospels  without  title  or  author's  name,  and  knowing 
from  Eusebius  that  Tatian  had  been  the  author  of  a 
harmony,  he  conjectured  that  the  harmony  which  he  found 
was  Tatian's.  This  conjecture  did  not  receive  much  atten 
tion  until  on  the  publication  of  Moesinger's  work,  the  co 
incidences  made  it  apparent  that  the  Latin  harmony  really 
was  based  on  Tatian's  Diatessaron.*  The  compiler,  however, 
'instead  of  following  Tatian's  text,  has  copied  the  Vulgate 
translation  of  the  verses  selected.  He  has  also  restored  the 
genealogies  and  corrected  some  other  omissions,  so  that  the 
Latin  harmony  is  no  more  than  a  help  towards  the  restoration 
of  the  Diatessaron,  and  could  not  singly  be  relied  on  for  that 
purpose.  But  the  interest  excited  by  Moesinger's  publica 
tion  has  led  to  the  recovery  of  an  Arabic  translation  of  the 
Diatessaron.  One  MS.  copy  had  been  known  to  exist  in  the 
Vatican  Library,  and  another  was  lately  brought  from  Egypt 
to  Rome.  An  edition  founded  on  these  two  MSS.  was  printed, 
with  a  Latin  translation  by  Ciasca,  as  a  present  for  the 
jubilee  of  Leo  XIII.,  in  1888.  The  result  is,  that  the 
obscurity  which  for  so  many  centuries  lay  over  the  Diates 
saron  has  been  now  in  great  measure  rolled  away,  and  we 
can  speak  of  its  contents  with  tolerable  certainty.f 

We  find  then  that  it  begins,  as  Bar-Salibi  had  told  us,  with 
the  prologue  of  St.  John.  It  then  takes  up  the  first  chapter 
of  St.  Luke,  and  so  it  goes  on,  passing  freely  from  one 
Gospel  to  another,  and  (I  may  add)  including  part  of  the  last 


*  See  Wace's  paper  referred  to,  p.  85. 

f  Using  the  sources  enumerated  above,  Mr.  Hemphill  has  edited  the 
Diatessaron  in  an  English  form  (Hodder  &  Stoughton,  1888).  He  makes 
one  interesting  new  observation.  Eusebius,  as  has  been  mentioned  above, 
had  stated  that  what  he  calls  rb  Sia  reffffdpcav  evayye\iov  left  by  Ammonius 
of  Alexandria  had  St.  Matthew's  narrative  as  its  basis.  Now,  at  first 
sight,  this  appears  not  to  be  the  case  with  Tatian's  Diatessaron  which,  as 
we  have  said,  begins  with  the  prologue  of  St.  John,  passes  then  to  St. 
Luke,  and  seems  to  use  all  four  Gospels  on  equal  terms.  But  Mr.  Hemphill 
notes  that  the  passages  extracted  from  St.  Matthew  in  this  Diatessaron 
follow,  with  scarcely  an  exception,  the  order  of  that  Gospel,  while  the 
extracts  from  the  other  Gospels  are  taken  promiscuously.  Thus  we  may 
conceive  the  Diatessaron  as  made  by  taking  St.  Matthew's  Gospel,  leaving 
out  some  things,  and  interpolating  others  derived  from  the  other  Gospels. 
The  idea  thus  suggests  itself,  that  Tatian's  Diatessaron  may  have  been  the 
basis  of  the  harmony  of  Ammonius,  but  the  total  loss  of  the  latter  work 
leaves  us  without  the  means  of  verifying  this  conjecture.  St.  Jerome  (Ep* 


VII.]          THE   BEGINNING   OF   THE   SECOND   CENTURY.  87 

chapter  of  St.  John,  as  to  the  genuineness  of  which  some  very 
unreasonable  doubts  have,  in  modern  times,  been  entertained. 
If,  then,  it  appears  that  Justin's  pupil,  Tatian,  used  all 
four  Gospels  on  equal  terms,  the  conclusion  at  which  we  had 
already  arrived,  that  Justin  himself  did  so,  is  abundantly 
confirmed.* 


VII. 

PART    IV. 

THE    BEGINNING   OF   THE    SECOND    CENTURY. 


PAPIAS — APOSTOLIC    FATHERS. 

WE  have  seen  now  that  in  the  middle  of  the  second  cen 
tury  our  four  Gospels  had  obtained  their  pre-eminence,  and 
enjoyed  the  distinction  of  use  in  the  public  service  of  the 
Church.  To-day  I  go  back  to  an  earlier  witness,  Papias,  who 
was  bishop  of  Hierapolis,  in  Phrygia,  in  the  first  half  of  the 
second  century.  Although  all  that  we  have  remaining  of 
him  which  bears  on  the  subject  is  half-a-dozen  sentences, 
which  happen  to  have  been  quoted  by  Eusebius,  countless 
pages  have  been  written  on  these  fragments  ;  and,  what 
seems  not  reasonable,  almost  as  much  stress  has  been  laid 
on  what  they  do  not  mention  as  on  what  they  do.  Indeed, 
nothing  can  be  more  unfair  or  more  absurd  than  the  manner 

121,  ad  Algas.,  i.  860)  speaks  also  of  Theophilus  of  Antioch  as  the  author 
of  a  harmony.  As  we  do  not  hear  of  this  elsewhere,  it  is  commonly  sup 
posed  that  Jerome  made  a  mistake  in  ascribing  to  Theophilus  the  work  of 
Tatian. 

*  I  observe  that  Dean  Burgon  refuses  to  join  in  the  general  recognition 
of  the  harmony  published  by  Moesinger  as  Tatian' s,  and  refers  to  the 
author  as  Pseudo-Tatian.  But  every  specialist  is  in  danger  of  being  biassed 
by  the  consideration  how  a  decision  affects  his  own  subject.  A  very 
ancient  reading  of  Matt,  xxvii.  49  recorded  there  the  piercing  of  our  Lord's 
side,  now  found  only  in  St.  John's  Gospel,  and  placed  the  incident  before 
our  Lord's  death.  On  the  authority  of  a  scholium  which  made  '  Diodorus 
and  Tatian'  responsible  for  this  reading,  a  plausible  explanation  was  given, 
that  the  currency  of  Tatian's  harmony,  in  which  the  words  of  different 
Evangelists  had  been  mixed  together,  had,  in  this  instance,  led  to  a  trans 
ference  of  an  incident  related  by  St.  John  to  an  improper  place  in  the  first 
Gospel.  But  this  explanation  receives  no  confirmation  from  the  newly- 
recovered  text  of  Ephraem.  It  seems  to  me  that  this  is  not  a  sufficient 
reason  for  discrediting  that  text. 


88  THE    GOSPELS    IN   THE    EARLY   CHURCH.  [VII. 

in  which  the  argumentum  ex  silentio  has  been  urged  by  scepti 
cal  critics  in  the  case  of  writers  of  whom  we  have  scarcely  any 
extant  remains.     The  author  of  '  Supernatural  Religion,'  for 
instance,  argues:  The  Gospels  of  St.  Luke  and  St.  John  can- 
Snot  be  earlier  than  the  end  of  the  second  century,  because 
Hegesippus,  because  Papias,  because  Dionysius  of  Corinth, 
&c.,  were  unacquainted  with  them.     Well,  how  do  you  know 
that  they  were  unacquainted  with  them  ?   Because  they  never 
mention  them.     But  how  do  you  know  that  they  never  men 
tioned  them,  seeing  that  their  writings  have  not  come  down 
to  us  ?    Because  Eusebius  does  not  tell  us  that  they  did  ;  and 
he  would  have  been  sure  to  tell  us  if  they  had,  for  he  says 
that  he  made  it  his  special  business  to  adduce  testimonies  to 
the  Canon  of  Scripture.     Now,  here  is  exactly  where  these 
writers  have  misunderstood  Eusebius  ;  for  the  point  to  which 
he  says  he  gave  particular  attention  was  to  adduce  testimonies 
to  those  books  of  the  Canon  which  were  disputed  in  his  time;* 
and,  in  one  of  his  papers,!  Bishop  Lightfoot  most  satisfac 
torily  shows  that  this  was  his  practice,  by  examining  the  re 
port  which  Eusebius  gives  of  books  which  have  come  down 
'.to  us.  Eusebius  tells  us  (H.  E.  iii.  37)  that  Clement  of  Rome 
used  the  Epistle  to  the  Hebrews,  but  never  says  a  word  as  to 
his  quoting  the  First  Epistle  to  the  Corinthians,  though  the 
latter  quotation  is  express  (Clem.  Rom.  47),  and  the  use  of 
'the  former  Epistle  is  only  inferred  from  the  identity  of  certain 
^expressions.     The  explanation  plainly  is,  that  there  was  still 
,  some  controversy  in  the  time  of  Eusebius  about  the  Epistle 
|to  the  Hebrews,  and  none  at  all  about  the  Epistles  to  the 
Corinthians.     In  like  manner,  he  tells  us  (H.  E.  iv.  24)  that 
Theophilus  of  Antioch  used  the  Revelation  of  St.  John,  but 
never  says  a  word  about  his  quotation  of  the  Gospel ;  though, 
las  I  have  already  said,  Theophilus  is  the  earliest  writer  now 


*  The  words  in  which  Eusebius  states  his  design  (iii.  3)  are : 
fj.riva.ffQa.1  rives  rcav  Kara.  -)^p6vovs  fKK^ffiaffriKcav  <rvyypa<p€cav  diroiais 
KC'XP^VTCU  rcav  avn^eyo^fvcav,  riva  re  TTfpl  rcav  fvSiaOriitcav  Kal  6/no\oyov[jievwv 
ypa<j>a>v,  Kal  off  a  -rrtpl  rcav  ^  rotovrcav,  avro'is  eiprjrai :  that  is  to  say,  he 
undertakes  to  mention  instances  of  the  use  of  any  of  the  disputed  writings 
together  with  any  statements  that  he  found  concerning  the  composition  of 
any  of  the  writings,  whether  canonical  or  not. 

f  Contemporary  Review,  January,  1875. 


VII.]  PAPIAS.  89 

extant  who  mentions  John  by  name  as  the  author  of  the\ 
fourth  Gospel.  Why  so  ?  Plainly  because  the  Revelation  ' 
was  still  matter  of  controversy,  and  there  was  no  dispute  in 
the  time  of  Eusebius  about  the  fourth  Gospel.  Other  in 
stances  of  the  same  kind  may  be  given.  Perhaps  the  most 
remarkable  is  the  account  which  Eusebius  gives  (v.  8)  of  the 
use  which  Irenaeus  makes  of  the  Holy  Scriptures.  Eusebius 
begins  the  chapter  by  calling  to  mind  how,  at  the  outset  of 
his  history,  he  had  promised  to  quote  the  language  in  which 
ancient  ecclesiastical  writers  had  handed  down  the  tradition 
which  had  come  to  them  concerning  the  canonical  Scrip 
tures  ;  and,  in  fulfilment  of  this  promise,  he  undertakes  to 
give  the  language  of  Irenaeus.  He  then  quotes  some  things 
said  by  Irenaeus  about  the  four  Gospels,  something  more  said 
by  him  about  the  Apocalypse,  and  then  mentions,  in  general 
terms,  that  Irenaeus  had  quoted  the  First  Epistle  of  John  and 
the  First  Epistle  of  Peter,  and  that  he  was  not  only  acquainted 
with  the  '  Shepherd  of  Hernias'  but  accepted  it  as  Scripture. 
Not  a  word  is  said  about  Irenaeus  having  used  the  Acts  and 
the  Epistles  of  St.  Paul.  If  the  writings  of  Irenaeus  had 
perished,  and  our  knowledge  of  them  had  depended  on  this 
chapter,  he  would  have  been  set  down  as  an  Ebionite  anti- 
Pauline  writer ;  for  it  would  have  been  argued  that  the  silence 
of  Eusebius,  when  expressly  undertaking  to  tell  what  were  the 
Scriptures  used  by  Irenaeus,  was  conclusive  evidence  that  the 
latter  did  not  employ  the  Pauline  writings.  Actually,  how 
ever,  Irenaeus  refers  to  Paul  more  than  two  hundred  times, 
and  it  becomes  plain  that  the  reason  why  Eusebius  says 
nothing  about  it  is,  because  in  his  mind  it  was  a  matter 
of  course  that  a  Christian  should  acknowledge  St.  Paul's 
Epistles.  We  see,  then,  that  we  have  not  the  slightest  rea 
son  to  expect  that  Eusebius  should  go  out  of  his  way  to 
adduce  testimonies  to  the  Gospels  about  which  no  one  in 
his  time  had  any  doubt  whatever  ;  and,  therefore,  that  no 
argument  against  them  can  be  built  on  his  silence. 

To  return  to  Papias :  it  is  necessary  that  you  should  have 
before  you  the  facts  about  Papias  in  order  to  enable  you  to 
judge  of  the  theories  of  Renan  and  others  as  to  the  origin  of 
the  Gospels.  Papias  was  the  author  of  a  book  called  XoytW 


90  THE    GOSPELS    IN    THE    EARLY    CHURCH.  [VII. 


s,  an  Exposition*  of  the  oracles  of  the  Lord, 
of  which  Eusebius  and  Irenaeus  have  preserved  a  very  few 
fragments  ;  and  in  this  is  the  earliest  extant  mention  of  the 
names  of  Matthew  and  Mark  as  the  recognized  authors  of 
Gospels.  Eusebius  (H.  E.  iii.  36),  according  to  some  manu 
scripts  of  his  work,  describes  Papias  as  a  man  of  the  greatest 
erudition,  and  well  skilled  in  the  Scriptures  ;  but  it  must  be 
owned  that  this  favourable  testimony  is  deficient  in  manu 
script  authority  ;  and  elsewhere  (H.  E.  iii.  39)  commenting 
on  some  millennarian  traditions  of  his,  he  remarks  that 
Papias,  who  was  *  a  man  of  very  narrow  understanding  (o-^oSpa 
oyu/cpos  TOV  vovv},  as  his  writings  prove,'  must  have  got  these 
opinions  from  a  misunderstanding  of  the  writings  of  the 
Apostles.  It  is  a  very  possible  thing  for  a  man  of  weak 
judgment  to  possess  considerable  learning  and  a  good  know 
ledge  of  Scripture  ;  and  so  what  Eusebius  says  in  disparage 
ment  of  Papias  in  one  place  does  not  forbid  us  to  believe 
that  he  may  have  given  him  some  measure  of  commendation 
in  another.  What  is  the  exact  date  of  Papias  is  uncertain. 
We  know  that  he  lived  in  the  first  half  of  the  second  century; 
but  some  place  him  at  the  very  beginning  ;  others,  not  earlier 
than  Justin  Martyr.  But  the  chief  authority  for  placing  him 
at  the  later  date  has  been  exploded  by  Bishop  Lightfoot.f 
The  '  Paschal  Chronicle,'  a  compilation  of  the  sixth  or 
seventh  century,  states  that  Papias  was  martyred  at  Pergamum 
in  the  year  164.  But  coincidences  of  language  clearly  show 
that  the  compiler  is  drawing  his  information  from  a  passage 
in  the  '  Ecclesiastical  History  '  of  Eusebius,  where  the  mar 
tyrdom  of  one  Papylus  at  Pergamum  is  mentioned.  The 
confounding  of  this  man  with  Papias  is  a  mere  blunder  of  the 
'  Paschal  '  compiler  ;  and  so  we  are  left  to  gather  the  date  of 
Papias  from  his  own  writings.  These  clearly  show  that  he 
lived  at  a  time  when  it  was  still  thought  possible  to  obtain 
oral  traditions  of  the  facts  of  our  Saviour's  life.J 


*  Or  '  Expositions '  ;  for  readings  vary  between  the  singular  and  the 
plural. 

f  Contemporary  Review,  Aug.  1875,  Colossians,  p.  48. 

J  On  this  account  it  seems  to  me  that  A.D.  125  or  130  is  as  late  as  we 
can  place  his  work. 


VII.]  PAPIAS.  91 

I  will  ask  you  to  attend  carefully  to  what  Papias  says  as 
to  the  sources  of  his  information  : — '  If  I  met  anywhere  with 
anyone  who  had  been  a  follower  of  the  elders,  I  used  to 
inquire  what  were  the  declarations  of  the  elders  ;  what  was 
said  by  Andrew,  by  Peter,  by  Philip,  what  by  Thomas  or 
James,  what  by  John  or  Matthew,  or  any  other  of  the  disciples 
of  our  Lord  ;  and  the  things  which  Aristion  and  the  elder  [or 
presbyter]  John,  the  disciples  of  the  Lord  say ;  for  I  did  not 
expect  to  derive  so  much  benefit  from  the  contents  of  books 
as  from  the  utterances  of  a  living  and  abiding  voice.'*  By 
disciples  of  our  Lord  Papias  clearly  means  men  who  had 
personal  intercourse  with  him ;  but  it  is  a  point  which  has 
been  much  discussed  whether  Papias  claims  to  have  known 
the  Apostle  John.  The  name  John,  you  will  observe,  occurs 
twice  over  in  this  extract — '  What  was  said  by  John  or 
Matthew ' ;  '  what  is  said  by  Aristion  and  John  the  elder.' 
The  question  is,  whether  he  only  means  to  distinguish  these 
last  two,  concerning  whom  the  present  tense  is  used,  as  men 
still  surviving ;  or  whether,  beside  John  the  Apostle,  there 
was  another  later  John,  from  whom  Papias  derived  his  infor 
mation  ;  whether,  in  short,  Papias  was  so  early  as  to  have 
been  actually  a  hearer  of  the  Apostle  John,  or  whether  he 
was  separated  from  him  by  one  link.  Eusebius  was,  I  believe, 
the  first  to  remark  the  double  mention  of  John,  from  which 
he  concluded  that  two  Johns  were  referred  to ;  and  those  in 
the  third  century  who  denied  the  Apostolic  origin  of  the 
Revelation  had  already  suggested  that  a  John  different 
from  the  Apostle  might  have  been  its  author.  It  must,  how- 

*  The  following  is  the  extract  given  by  Eusebius  from  the  Preface  of 
Papias :  but  the  student  ought  to  read  carefully  the  whole  chapter  (Euseb. 
H.  E.  iii.  39).  He  will  find  the  other  fragments  of  Papias  in  Routh's  Rell. 
Sac.  i.  8,  or  in  Gebhardt  and  Harnack's  Apostolic  Fathers,  I.  ii.  87  : — 

Owe  oKV-fjo-ca  Se  <roi  Kal  uffa  -rrore  irapa  rSov  irpefffivrepcav  /coAcDs  t/uaOov  Kal 
Ka\u>s  efj.vf}fj.6vevffa,  o~vyKarard^ai  rats  ep/j.r]veiais,  8t.a&ff3aiov[j.evos  virep 
avruv  aXriQeiav.  Ov  yap  roTs  TO,  TroAAo  Xeyovffiv  e^aipov  &wrep  ol  TTO\\O\ 
a\\a  rots  ra.\ri&ri  SiSdffKOvo'iv'  ovSe  rots  ras  a\\orpias  eVroAas  fj.VTf)fj.ovevov- 
o~iv,  oAAa  TO?S  ras  irapa  rov  Kvpiov  rrj  iriffrei  SeSo/nevas,  Kal  air'  avrrjs  irapa- 
ytvo/jievas  TTJS  aXrjdeias.  Et  Se  TTOU  Kal  Trapi]Ko\ovdr]K(as  TLS  TO?S  Trpe<T@vT€pois 
e\0oi,  rovs  T&V  irpea-^vrepcav  aveKpivov  \6yovs'  ri  'AvS/je'as,  ^  TI  Herpes 
flireVy  $)  ri  &i\LTnros,  ^  ri  ©a^uas,  3)  'Ia/ca>$os'  ^  ri  'loadvvrjs,  7)  Marda?os,  % 
rls  frfpos  ra>v  rov  Kvpiov  fj.(idr)rcav'  a  re  'Apiffricav,  Kal  6  Trpeo~0vrepos 
'Iwai/j/rjy  of  rov  Kvpiov  u.aQi]ra\  \eyovo~iv.  Ov  yap  ra  eK  r&v 
ro<Tovr6v  fj.e  w(pe\e'iv  i)ire\ap.$a.vov,  '6ffov  ra  Trapa 


92  THE   GOSPELS   IN   THE   EARLY   CHURCH.  [vil. 

ever,  be  borne  in  mind  that  the  fact  that  Papias  twice  men 
tions  the  name  John  does  not  make  it  absolutely  certain  that 
he  meant  to  speak  of  two  Johns  ;  and  there  is  no  other  in 
dependent  witness  to  the  existence  of  the  second.  Irenaeus 
(v.  xxxiii.  4),  in  fact,  makes  no  doubt  that  it  was  John  the 
Apostle  of  whom  Papias  was  a  disciple ;  and  this  view  was 
generally  adopted  by  later  ecclesiastical  writers. 

In  order  that  we  may  have  before  us  all  the  facts  we  are 
discussing,  I  will  read  at  once  the  two  passages  in  which 
Papias  speaks  of  Matthew  and  Mark.  I  told  you  already 
that  in  his  fragments  we  find  the  first  mention  of  any  of  our 
Evangelists  by  name.  On  the  authority  of  John  the  elder 
Papias  writes  : — '  And  this  also  the  elder  said  :  Mark,  having 
become  the  interpreter  (ep/^i/eimjs)  of  Peter,  wrote  accurately 
all  that  he  remembered  of  the  things  that  were  either  said  or 
done  by  Christ ;  but,  however,  not  in  order.  For  he  neither 
heard  the  Lord  nor  followed  Him,  but  subsequently,  as  I  said,* 
[attached  himself  to]  Peter,  who  used  to  frame  his  teaching 
to  meet  the  immediate  wants  [of  his  hearers],  but  not  as 
making  a  connected  narrative  of  our  Lord's  discourses.! 
So  Mark  committed  no  error  in  thus  writing  down  particulars 
just  as  he  remembered  them  ;  for  he  took  heed  to  one  thing, 
to  omit  none  of  the  things  that  he  had  heard,  and  to  state 
nothing  falsely  in  his  narrative  of  them.'  Eusebius  next 
gives  Papias's  statement  concerning  Matthew  : — *  Matthew 
wrote  the  oracles  (ra  Xoyta)  in  Hebrew,  and  each  one  inter 
preted  them  as  he  could. 'J  Eusebius  gives  no  quotation  from 
Papias  concerning  St.  Luke's  or  St.  John's  Gospels.  He 
mentions,  however,  that  Papias  quoted  John's  first  Epistle; 
and  since  that  Epistle  and  the  Gospel  have  evident  marks  of 

*  Eusebius  states  that  Papias  quoted  the  First  Epistle  of  Peter;  and 
reasons  will  be  given  afterwards  for  thinking  that  in  the  place  here  referred 
to  Papias  quoted  I  Pet.  v.  13. 

t  Or  oracles :  the  reading  varies  between  \6ytav  and  \oyiwv. 

+  Kai  Tov0'  6  TrpefffivTepos  H\sy£.  MdpKOS  /J.€V  epurjvevT^js  Herpov 
fjifvos,  offa  e/j.vr)/u.6js€V(rev,  aKpifioas  fypatyev,  ov  p.fV  roi  ra£et  TO  vi 
XpifTToD  3)  Xexdfvra  3}  Trpax^evTa.  Oivre  yap  tffcovffe  rov  Kvpiov,  cure 
KO\ov9r)(Tfi'  avrif '  vffTepov  8e,  us  ffpffv,  Herpci},  e>s  irpbs  ras  XPe/ias 
TOS  SiSacrKaA/as  aAA'  ovx.  &o"Tep  ffvvTa^iv  ruv  KvpiaKwv  Troiov/mevos  X6^(i>v} 
&ffre  ovSev  rj/mapTf  MapKos,  OVTODS  evict  ypd\]/as  ws  a.TTf/ni'rj/Lioufvae^.  'Evbs  yap 
4iroi-r)ffaTo  irpovoiav,  rov  /j.r)8ev  wv  TJKOvce  itapaXnrelv,  3)  \l/ev<raadai  TI  ff  auro?s. 

MaT0a?o$  [i.fv  ovv  'EfipatSi  StaXfKTcp  ra  \6yia  <rweypd\l/aTo.  tHp/j.-f]vevff€  8' 
avra  CDS  i\v  Svvarbs  e'/cacrros. 


VII.]  PAPIAS.  93 

common  authorship,  the  presumption  is  that  he  who  used  the 
one  used  the  other  also.  The  passages  I  have  just  quoted 
were  until  comparatively  modern  times  regarded  as  undoubted 
proofs  that  Papias  knew  our  present  Gospels  of  Matthew  and 
Mark.  Principally  on  his  authority  the  belief  was  founded 
that  Matthew's  Gospel  was  originally  written  in  Hebrew, 
and  that  Mark's  Gospel  was  founded  on  the  preaching  of 
Peter.*  But  it  has  been  contended  by  some  modern  critics 
that  our  present  first  two  Gospels  do  not  answer  the  descrip 
tions  given  by  Papias  of  the  works  of  which  he  speaks.  You 
see  how  hard  it  is  to  satisfy  the  sceptical  school  of  critics. 
When  we  produce  citations  in  verbal  accordance  with  our 
Gospels,  they  reply,  The  source  of  the  quotation  is  not  men 
tioned  ;  how  can  you  be  sure  that  it  is  taken  from  your 
Gospels  ?  Here,  when  we  have  a  witness  who  mentions 
Matthew  and  Mark  by  name,  they  ask,  How  can  you  tell 
whether  Papias's  Matthew  and  Mark  are  the  same  as  the 
Matthew  and  Mark  we  have  now  ? 

To  the  question  just  raised  I  am  going  to  pay  the  com 
pliment  of  giving  it  a  detailed  examination  ;  but  I  cannot 
forbear  saying  that  the  matter  is  one  in  which  doubt  is  wildly 
unreasonable.  Juvenal  tells  us  that  the  works  of  Virgil  and 
Horace  were  in  the  hands  of  schoolboys  in  his  time.  Who 
dreams  of  raising  the  question  whether  the  works  referred 
to  by  Juvenal  were  the  same  as  those  we  now  ascribe  to 
these  authors  ?  And  yet  that  a  change  should  be  made  in 
books  in  merely  private  circulation  is  a  small  improbability 
compared  with  the  improbability  that  a  revolutionary  change 
should  be  made  in  books  in  weekly  ecclesiastical  use.  We 
have  seen  that  in  the  time  of  Justin  the  Gospels  of  Matthew 

*  The  dependence  of  Mark's  Gospel  upon  Peter  is  also  asserted  by 
Clement  of  Alexandria  (Euseb.  H.  E.  vi.  14),  who,  no  doubt,  may  have 
had  Papias  for  his  authority.  It  has  even  been  thought  that  Justin  Martyr 
refers  to  the  second  Gospel  as  Peter's.  In  the  passage  quoted,  p.  70, 
where  Justin  says  that  our  Lord  gave  to  the  sons  of  Zebedee  the  name 
Boanerges,  he  adds  that  Christ  changed  the  name  of  one  of  the  Apostles 
to  Peter,  and  that  '  this  is  written  in  his  memoirs.'  Grammatically,  this 
may  mean,  either  Christ's  memoirs  or  Peter's  memoirs;  and  considering 
that  Justin's  ordinary  name  for  the  Gospels  is  '  the  Memoirs  of  the 
Apostles,'  some  have  supposed  that  he  here  uses  the  genitive  in  the  same 
way,  and  that  he  describes  the  second  Gospel  (the  only  one  containing  the 
name  Boanerges)  as  the  memoirs  of  the  Apostle  Peter. 


94  THE    GOSPELS   IN   THE    EARLY   CHURCH.  [VII. 

and  Mark  were  weekly  read  in  the  Church  service.  It  is 
absurd  to  imagine  that  the  liturgical  use  described  by  Justin 
originated  in  the  year  his  Apology  was  written.  We  must 
in  all  reason  attribute  to  it  some  years  of  previous  existence. 
Again,  we  must  allow  a  book  several  years  to  gain  credit 
and  authority,  before  we  can  conceive  its  obtaining  admis 
sion  into  Church  use.  If  our  present  Matthew  and  Mark 
supplanted  a  previous  Matthew  and  Mark,  at  least  the  new 
Gospels  would  not  be  stamped  with  Church  authority  until 
so  many  years  had  passed  that  the  old  ones  had  had  time 
to  be  forgotten,  and  the  new  to  be  accepted  as  the  genuine 
form  of  Apostolic  tradition.  Put  the  work  of  Papias  at  its 
earliest  (and  I  do  not  find  sceptical  critics  disposed  to  place 
it  so  very  early),  and  still  the  interval  between  it  and  Justin's 
Apology  is  not  adequate  to  account  for  the  change  alleged 
to  have  taken  place.  Observe  what  is  asserted  is  not  that 
some  corruptions  crept  into  the  text  of  the  Gospels  ascribed 
to  Matthew  and  Mark,  but  that  a  change  was  made  in  them 
altering  their  entire  character.  And  we  are  asked  to  believe 
that  no  one  remonstrated,  that  the  old  Gospels  perished  out 
of  memory,  without  leaving  a  trace  behind,  and  that  the 
new  ones  reigned  in  their  stead,  without  anyone  finding  out 
the  difference !  I  shall  afterwards  have  to  consider  specu 
lations  as  to  the  process  by  which  it  is  imagined  floating- 
traditions  as  to  the  Saviour's  life  crystallized  into  the  form 
of  our  present  Gospels.  What  I  say  now  is,  that  the  interval 
between  Papias  and  Justin  is  altogether  too  short  to  leave 
room  for  such  a  process.  The  mention  by  Papias  of  Matthew 
and  Mark  by  name  is  evidence  enough  that  in  his  time  these 
Gospels  had  already  taken  their  definite  form  ;  for  it  is  incon 
ceivable  that  if  anyone  in  the  second  century  had  presumed 
to  remodel  a  Gospel  which  bore  the  name,  and  was  believed 
to  be  the  work,  of  an  Apostle,  there  would  not  be  many  who 
would  prefer  and  preserve  the  older  form.  I  am  persuaded, 
then,  that  interpreters  of  the  words  of  Papias  get  on  an 
entirely  wrong  track  if,  instead  of  patiently  examining  what 
opinion  concerning  our  present  Gospels  his  words  indicate, 
they  fly  off  to  imagine  some  other  Matthew  and  Mark,  to 
which  his  words  shall  be  more  applicable. 


VII.]  PAPIAS.  95 

Once  more,  I  may  take  a  hint  from  our  opponents,  and, 
with  better  reason  than  they,  build  an  argument  on  the 
silence  of  Eusebius.  He  had  before  him  the  whole  book, 
which  we  only  know  by  two  or  three  extracts ;  and  no 
passage  in  it  suggested  to  him  that  Papias  used  different 
Gospels  from  ours,  or  that  he  even  used  an  extra-canonical 
Gospel.  Now,  although  Eusebius  is  apt  to  see  nothing  call 
ing  for  remark  when  an  ecclesiastical  writer  expresses  the 
opinion  which  the  later  Church  generally  agreed  to  hold, 
he  takes  notice  readily  enough  of  any  divergence  from  that 
opinion.  For  instance,  in  his  account  of  the  Ignatian 
Letters  he  takes  no  notice  of  a  couple  of  fairly  accurate 
quotations  from  our  Gospels ;  but  he  singles  out  for  remark 
the  only  passage  suggesting  a  possible  use  of  a  different 
source.  (H.  E.  iii.  36  ;  Ignat.  Smyrn.  3.) 

To  return  now  to  the  reasons  alleged  for  facing  so  many 
improbabilities,  it  is  urged  that  there  is  a  striking  resemblance 
between  the  Gospels  of  Matthew  and  Mark  as  we  have  them 
now,  but  that  Papias's  description  would  lead  us  to  think  of 
them  as  very  different.  Matthew's  Gospel  was,  according  to 
him,  a  Hebrew  work,  containing  an  account  only  of  our  Lord's 
discourses ;  for  so  Schleiermacher*  would  have  us  translate 
TO,  Xoyta,  the  word  which  I  have  rendered  '  oracles.'  Mark, 
on  the  other  hand,  wrote  in  Greek,  and  recorded  what  was 
done  as  well  as  what  was  said  by  Christ — ra  VTTO  TOV  X/HO-TOV  ?} 
\€x@*vTa  ?}  Trpa^eVra.  Again,  Mark's  Gospel,  which  in  its 
present  state  has  the  same  claims  to  orderly  arrangement  as 
Matthew's,  was,  according  to  Papias,  not  written  in  order. 
The  conclusion,  then,  which  has  been  drawn  from  these 
premisses,  is  that  Papias's  testimony  does  not  relate  to  our 
present  Gospels  of  Matthew  and  Mark,  but  to  certain  un 
known  originals,  out  of  which  these  Gospels  have  sprung  ; 
and  in  some  books  of  the  sceptical  school  the  '  original 
Matthew'  and  'original  Mark'  (Ur-Markus)  are  constantly 
spoken  of,  though  there  is  no  particle  of  evidence,  beyond 
that  which  I  have  laid  before  you,  that  there  ever  was  any 
Gospel  by  Matthew  and  Mark  different  from  those  we  have  got. 

*  Schleiermacher  (1768- 1834),  Professor  of  Theology  at  Halle,  and  after 
wards  at  Berlin.  His  essay  on  the  testimony  of  Papias  to  our  first  two 
Gospels  appeared  in  the  Theol.  Stud,  ^md  Krit.y  1832. 


96  THE    GOSPELS    IN    THE    EARLY   CHURCH.  [VIT. 

Thus,  according  to  Renan,  Papias  was  in  possession  of 
two  documents  quite  different  from  one  another — a  collection 
of  our  Lord's  discourses  made  by  Matthew,  and  a  collection 
of  anecdotes  taken  down  by  Mark  from  Peter's  recollections  ; 
and  Renan  (Vie  de  Jesus,  p.  xxii.)  thus  describes  the  process 
by  which  Matthew's  Gospel  gradually  absorbed  Mark's  anec 
dotes,  and  Mark's  derived  a  multitude  of  features  from  the 
'Logia'  of  Matthew: — 'As  it  was  thought  the  world  was 
near  its  end,  men  were  little  anxious  about  composing  books 
for  the  future  :  all  they  aimed  at  was  to  keep  in  their  hearts 
the  living  image  of  Him  whom  they  hoped  soon  to  see  again 
in  the  clouds.  Hence  the  small  authority  which  the  evan 
gelic  texts  enjoyed  for  one  hundred  and  fifty  years.*  No 
scruple  was  felt  as  to  inserting  additions  in  them,  combining 
them  diversely,  and  completing  one  by  another.'  The  pas 
sage  I  am  reading  illustrates  the  character  of  Renan's  whole 
book,  in  which  he  trusts  far  more  to  his  power  of  divination 
than  to  evidence,  his  statements  being  often  supported  by  the 
slenderest  authority.  Thus,  for  this  statement  that  for  a 
century  men  had  no  scruple  in  transposing,  combining,  and 
interpolating  the  evangelic  records,  there  is  not  a  shadow  of 
proof.  Renan  goes  on  to  say  : — '  The  poor  man  who  has 
only  one  book  wants  it  to  contain  everything  which  goes  to 
his  heart.  These  little  books  were  lent  by  one  to  another. 
Each  transcribed  in  the  margin  of  his  copy  the  words,  the 
parables,  which  he  found  elsewhere,  and  which  touched  him. 
Thus  has  the  finest  thing  in  the  world  issued  from  a  process 
worked  out  unobserved  and  quite  unauthoritatively.'f  In  this 
way  we  are  to  suppose  that  the  Gospels  of  St.  Matthew  and 
St.  Mark,  which  were  originally  unlike,  came,  by  a  process 
i  of  mutual  assimilation,  to  their  present  state  of  resemblance. 

If  this  theory  were  true,  we  should  expect  to  find  in  early 
times  a  multitude  of  Gospels,  differing  in  their  order  and  in 
their  selection  of  facts,  according  as  the  different  possessors 
of  manuscripts  had  differently  inserted  the  discourses  or 
events  which  touched  their  hearts.  In  the  more  ancient 
manuscripts  the  order  of  the  events  would  become  uncertain. 

*  Later  editions,  'nearly  one  hundred.' 

t  '  La  plus  belle  chose  du  monde  est  ainsi  sortie  d'une  elaboration  obscure 
et  completement  populaire. 


VII.]  PAPIAS.  97 

It  would  even  be  doubtful  to  which  Gospel  this  or  that  story 
should  be  referred.  Why  we  should  have  now  exactly  four 
versions  of  the  story  is  not  easy  to  explain.  We  should  expect 
that,  by  the  process  of  mutual  assimilation  which  has  been 
described,  all  would,  in  the  end,  have  been  reduced  to  a  single 
Gospel.  Attempts  would  surely  have  been  made  to  bring  the 
order  of  the  different  Evangelists  to  uniformity.  If  one  'poor 
man'  had  written  an  anecdote  in  his  manuscript  in  a  wrong 
place,  another  would  not  scruple  to  change  it. 

But  the  fact  is  that  our  four  Gospels  are  as  distinct,  and 
the  order  of  the  events  as  definite,  in  the  earliest  manuscripts 
as  in  the  latest ;  and  if  such  variations  as  I  have  described 
had  ever  prevailed,  it  is  incredible  that  no  trace  of  them 
should  be  found  in  any  existing  authority.  The  two  Gospels 
of  Matthew  and  Mark,  with  all  their  likeness,  remain  quite 
distinct  as  far  as  we  can  trace  them  back.  Nor  is  there  the 
slightest  uncertainty  as  to  the  order  of  narration  of  either. 
One  solitary  fact  is  appealed  to  by  Renan  in  his  note  as  the 
sole  basis  for  his  monstrous  theory.  The  section  of  St.  John's 
Gospel  which  contains  the  story  of  the  woman  taken  in  adul 
tery  is,  as  you  probably  know,  wanting  in  the  most  ancient 
manuscripts;  in  a  few  copies  it  is  absent  from  the  place  where 
it  occurs  in  the  received  text,  but  is  added  at  the  end  of  the 
Gospel ;  and  in  five  manuscripts  of  comparatively  late  date, 
which,  however,  show  evident  marks  of  having  been  copied 
from  a  common  original,  it  is  inserted  in  St.  Luke's  Gospel 
at  the  end  of*  the  2ist  chapter.  It  would  be  out  of  place  to 
discuss  here  the  genuineness  of  this  particular  passage.* 
Critics  generally  regard  it  as  an  authentic  fragment  of  apos 
tolic  tradition,  but  not  as  a  genuine  part  of  St.  John's  Gospel. 
But  now  it  is  manifest  that  the  phenomena  which  present 
themselves  in  a  small  degree  in  the  case  of  this  story  would, 
if  Kenan's  theory  were  true,  show  themselves  in  a  multitude  of 
cases.  There  would  be  a  multitude  of  parables  and  miracles 
with  respect  to  which  we  should  be  uncertain  whether  they 

*  Eusebius  gives  us  some  reason  to  think  that  the  story  of  the  adulteress  tf 
was  related  in  the  work  of  Papias.     If,  as  Lightfoot  conjectures,  it  was' 
told  in  illustration  of  our  Lord's  words,  'I  judge  no  man'  (John  viii.  15),  | 
we  have  an  explanation  how  the  paragraph  has  come  to  be  inserted  in  thei! 
particular  place  in  which  we  rind  it. 

H 


98  THE    GOSPELS    IN    THE    EARLY   CHURCH.  [VII. 

were  common  to  all  the  Evangelists  or  special  to  one,  and 
what  place  in  that  one  they  ought  to  occupy.  Further, 
according  to  the  hypothesis  stated,  Mark's  design  was  more 
comprehensive  than  Matthew's.  Matthew  only  related  our 
Lord's  discourses  ;  Mark,  the  things  said  or  done  by  Christ — 
that  is  to  say,  both  discourses  and  actions  of  Jesus.  If  this 
were  so,  it  might  be  expected  that  Mark's  Gospel  would  differ 
from  Matthew's  by  excess,  and  Matthew's  would  read  like  a 
series  of  extracts  from  Mark's.  Exactly  the  opposite  is  the 
case. 

But  I  wholly  disbelieve  that  the  word  Aoyta  in  the  extract 
from  Papias  is  rightly  translated  'the  speeches  of  our  Lord.' 
Not  to  speak  of  the  absurdity  of  supposing  a  collection  of  our 
Lord's  sayings  to  have  been  made  without  any  history  of  the 
occasions  on  which  they  were  spoken,  Aoyia  is  one  word, 
Aoyoi  another.  Examine  for  yourselves  the  four  passages  in 
which  the  former  word  occurs  in  the  New  Testament : — Acts 
vii.  38,  'Moses  received  the  lively  oracles  to  give  unto  us;' 
Rom.  iii.  2,  'To  the  Jews  were  committed  the  oracles  of 
God;'  Heb.  v.  12,  'Ye  have  need  that  we  teach  you  which 
be  the  first  principles  of  the  oracles  of  God;'  and  lastly, 

1  Peter  iv.  n,  'If  anyone  speak  let  him  speak  as  the  oracles 
of  God.'     Now,  when  Paul,  for  example,  says  that  to  the  Jews 
were  committed  the  oracles  of  God,  can  we  imagine  that  he 
confines  this  epithet  to  those  parts  of  the   Old  Testament 
which  contained  Divine  sayings,  and  that  he  excludes  those 
narrative  parts  from  which  he  has  himself  so  often  drawn 
lessons  in  his  Epistles ;  as,  for  instance,  the  account  of  the 
creation  which  he  uses,  i  Cor.  xi.  8  ;  the  account  of  the  fall, 

2  Cor.  xi.  3,  i  Tim.  ii.  14.;  the  wanderings  in  the  wilderness, 
i   Cor.  x.   i  ;    the  story  of  Sarah  and  Hagar,  Gal.  iv.  21  ;  or 
the  saying  (Gen.  xv.  6)  that  'Abraham  believed  God,  and  it 
was  counted  unto  him  for  righteousness,'  of  which  such  use 
is  made  both   in  the  Epistles   to   the  Romans  and  to  the 
Galatians.     Thus  we  find  that  in  the  New  Testament  Aoyia 
has  its  classical  meaning,  '  oracles,'    and   is   applied  to  the 
inspired  utterances  of  God  in  His  Holy  Scriptures.     This  is 
also  the  meaning  the  word  bears  in  the  Apostolic  Fathers 
and  in  other  Jewish  writers.     Philo  quotes  as  a  Ao'ycoi/,  an 


VII.]  PAPIAS.  99 

oracle  of  God,  the  narrative  in  Gen.  iv.  15,  'The  Lord  set  a 
mark  upon  Cain,  lest  any  finding  him  should  kill  him  ;'  and 
as  another  oracle  the  words,  Deut.  x.  9,  '  The  Lord  is  his 
inheritance.'  The  quotations  from  latter  writers,  who  use 
the  word  Adyta  generally  as  inspired  books,  are  too  abundant 
to  be  cited.  We  must  recollect  also  that  the  title  of  Papias's 
own  work  is  AoytW  KVPLO.KUV  e^y^o-ts,*  while  it  is  manifest 
that  the  book  was  not  confined  to  treating  of  our  Lord's 
discourses.  I  consider  the  true  conclusion  to  be,  that  as  we 
find  from  Justin  that  the  Gospels  were  put  on  a  level  with 
the  Old  Testament  in  the  public  reading  of  the  Church,  so 
we  find  from  Papias  that  the  name  Adyta,  the  oracles,  given 
to  the  Old  Testament  Scriptures,  was  also  given  to  the  Gos 
pels,  which  were  called  TO,  Kvpta/ca  Adyta,  the  oracles  of  our 
Lord.  The  title  of  Papias's  own  work  I  take  as  meaning 
simply  'an  exposition  of  the  Gospels;'  and  his  statement 
about  Matthew  I  take  as  meaning :  '  Matthew  composed  his 
Gospel  in  Hebrew,'  the  word  Adyta  implying  its  Scriptural 
authority.  I  do  not  know  any  passage  where  Adyta  means 
discourses ;  and  I  believe  the  notion  that  Matthew's  Gospel 
was  originally  only  a  collection  of  speeches  to  be  a  mere 
dream.  Indeed  the  theory  of  an  original  Matthew  contain 
ing  speeches,  and  an  original  Mark  containing  acts,  has  been 
so  worked  out  that  the  best  rationalist  critics  now  recognize 
its  absurdity.  For  it  was  noticed  that  our  present  Matthew 
contains  a  great  deal  of  history  not  to  be  found  in  our  pre 
sent  Mark ;  and  that  our  present  Luke  contains  a  great  many 
discourses  not  to  be  found  in  Matthew  ;  and  so  the  theory 
led  to  the  whimsical  result  of  critics  looking  for  the  ori 
ginal  Matthew  in  St.  Luke,  and  for  the  original  Mark  in  St. 
Matthew. 

A  more  careful  examination  of  what  Papias  says  leads  us, 
I  am  convinced,  to  a  very  different  conclusion.  On  read 
ing  what  Papias  says  about  Mark's  Gospel,  two  things  are 

*  '  If  there  were  any  doubt  as  to  the  meaning  of  this  title,  it  would  be 
removed  by  the  words  of  Irenseus  in  the  preface  to  his  treatise.  Certain, 
he  says,  Trapdyovffi  rbv  vovv  ruv  airfipOTepoav,  .  .  .  paSiovpyovvTes  T&  \6yia 
Kvptov,  e|7j777Tal  ttaitol  rwu  /caA<£s  etprj/xeVwj/  yiv6[Jievoi.  Papias  wished  to 
combat  false  interpretations  of  the  "  oracles  "  by  true.' — Westcott,  N.  T 
Canon,  p.  577. 

H  2 


100  THE    GOSPELS   IN    THE   EARLY   CHURCH.  [vil. 

apparent — first,  Papias  had  a  strong  belief  in  Mark's  perfect 
accuracy.  Three  times  in  this  short  fragment  he  asserts  it  : 
*  Mark  wrote  down  accurately  everything  he  remembered  ; ' 
'  Mark  committed  no  error;'  '  He  made  it  his  rule  not  to  omit 
anything  he  heard,  or  to  set  down  any  false  statement  there 
in.'  Secondly,  that  Papias  was  for  some  reason  dissatisfied 
with  Mark's  arrangement,  and  thought  it  necessary  to  apolo 
gize  for  it.  No  account  of  this  passage  is  satisfactory  which 
will  not  explain  why,  if  Papias  reverenced  Mark  so  much,  he 
was  dissatisfied  with  his  order.  Here  Kenan's  hypothesis 
breaks  down  at  once — the  hypothesis,  namely,  that  Papias 
was  in  possession  of  only  two  documents,  and  these  totally 
different  in  their  nature :  the  one  a  collection  of  discourses, 
and  the  other  a  collection  of  anecdotes.  Respecting,  as  he 
did,  Mark's  accuracy,  Papias  would  assuredly  have  accepted 
his  order  had  he  not  been  in  possession  of  some  other  docu 
ment,  to  which  for  some  reason  he  attached  more  value  in 
this  particular — a  document  going  over  somewhat  the  same 
ground  as  Mark's,  but  giving  the  facts  in  different  order. 
It  is  clear  that  the  Mark  of  which  Papias  was  in  possession 
did  not  merely  consist  of  loose  collections  of  unconnected 
anecdotes  of  our  Lord's  life,  but  was  a  Gospel  aiming  at 
some  orderly  arrangement.  It  was  not  the  case  that  the 
copies  of  this  Gospel  so  differed  from  each  other  as  to  make 
it  uncertain  what  was  the  order  in  which  it  gave  the  facts. 
This  order  was  definite,  and  though  Papias  was  dissatisfied 
with  it,  and  tried  to  explain  why  it  was  not  different,  he 
never  maintained  that  Mark  had  originally  written  the  facts 
in  any  different  or  preferable  order.  And  it  is  clear  that 
he  had  more  such  Gospels  than  one,  namely,  at  the  least, 
St.  Mark's  Gospel,  and  some  other  Gospel,  with  whose  order 
he  compared  St.  Mark's,  and  found  it  different. 

The  question  then  remains  to  be  answered :  If  Papias 
held  that  Mark's  Gospel  was  not  written  in  the  right  order, 
what  was,  in  his  opinion,  the  right  order  ?  Strauss  considers 
and  rejects  three  answers  to  this  question,  as  being  all  in 
admissible,  at  least  on  the  supposition  that  the  Gospel  known 
to  Papias  as  St.  Mark's  was  the  same  as  that  which  we 
receive  under  that  name.  These  answers  are :  first,  that  the 


VII.]  PAPIAS.  10 1 

right  order  was  St.  John's ;  secondly,  that  the  right  order 
was  St.  Matthew's;  thirdly,  that  Papias  meant  to  deny  to 
Mark  the  merit  not  only  of  the  right  order,  but  of  any  his 
torical  arrangement  whatever.  Of  these  three  solutions,  the 
first — that  the  right  order  in  Papias's  mind  was  St.  John's 
— is  that  defended  with  great  ability  by  Bishop  Lightfoot. 
Besides  these  there  remains  another,  which  I  believe  to  be 
the  true  one,  namely,  that  what  Papias  regarded  as  the  right 
order  was  St.  Luke's.  The  reason,  I  suppose,  why  this 
solution  has  been  thought  unworthy  of  discussion  is,  that 
no  mention  of  St.  Luke  is  made  in  any  of  the  fragments 
of  Papias  which  have  reached  us  ;  from  which  it  has  been 
assumed  to  be  certain  that  Papias  was  unacquainted  with 
Luke's  writings.  Now,  if  we  had  the  whole  work  of  Papias, 
and  found  he  had  said  nothing  about  St.  Luke,  it  might  be 
reasonable  to  ask  us  to  account  for  his  silence  ;  but  when  we 
have  only  remaining  some  very  brief  extracts  from  his  book, 
it  seems  ludicrous  to  conclude  that  Papias  was  ignorant  of 
St.  Luke,  merely  because  Eusebius  found  in  his  work  no 
statement  concerning  Luke  which  he  thought  worth  copy-^ 
ing.  With  regard  to  Matthew  and  Mark,  Eusebius  found  the 
statements  that  Mark  was  the  interpreter  of  Peter,  and  that 
Matthew  wrote  in  Hebrew,  and  these  he  thought  worth  pre 
serving;  but  if  Papias  added  nothing  to  what  was  known; 
about  Luke,  we  can  understand  why  Eusebius  should  not  I 
have  copied  any  mention  of  Luke  by  Papias.  The  fragments 
preserved  contain  clear  traces  that  Papias  was  acquainted  ' 
with  the  Acts,  and  since,  as  we  have  seen,  Luke's  Gospel 
was  certainly  known  to  Justin  Martyr,  who  was  not  so  much, 
later  than  Papias  that  both  may  not  have  been  alive  at  the* 
same  time,  the  conclusion  that  it  was  known  by  Papias  also1 
is  intrinsically  most  probable.  When,  therefore,  in  explain 
ing  the  language  used  by  Papias,  we  have  to  choose  between  I 
the  hypothesis  that  he  was  acquainted  with  Luke's  Gospel,  • 
and  the  hypothesis  that  the  Matthew  and  Mark  known  to 
Papias  perished  without  leaving  any  trace  of  their  existence, 
and  were  in  the  next  generation  silently  replaced  by  another  ,- 
Matthew  and  Mark,  the  former  hypothesis  is  plainly  to  be 
preferred,  if  it  will  give  an  equally  good  account  of  the  pheno-^ 


102  THE    GOSPELS   IN    THE    EARLY   CHURCH.  [vil. 

mena.  Since  we  know  from  Justin  that  it  was  the  custom  to 
read  the  Gospels  every  Sunday  in  the  Christian  assemblies, 
the  notion  that  one  of  these  could  have  been  utterly  lost,  and 
another  under  the  same  name  substituted,  is  as  extravagant  a 
supposition  as  can  well  be  imagined. 

In  support  of  my  opinion  that  Papias  knew  St.  Luke,  I 
may  quote  an  authority  above  suspicion — Hilgenfeld,  who 
may  be  pronounced  a  leader  of  the  present  German  Ration 
alist  school.  His  notion  is  that  Papias  was  acquainted  with 
Luke's  Gospel,  but  did  not  ascribe  to  it  the  same  authority  as 
to  Matthew  and  Mark.  And  his  opinion,  that  Papias  knew 
St.  Luke,  is  founded  on  a  comparison  of  the  preface  to  Luke's 
Gospel  with  the  preface  to  Papias's  work,  in  which  he  finds 
many  phrases  which  seem  to  him  an  echo  of  St.  Luke.  I  am 
disposed  to  think  he  is  right ;  but  the  resemblance  is  not 
striking  enough  to  convince  anyone  inclined  to  deny  it. 
Lightfoot  comes  to  the  same  conclusion  on  different  grounds, 
namely,  on  account  of  a  striking  coincidence  between  one  of 
the  fragments  of  Papias  and  Luke  x.  18. 

But  if  we  assume  that  Papias  recognized  St.  Luke's  Gos 
pel,  the  language  which  he  uses  with  respect  to  St.  Mark's 
is  at  once  accounted  for.  The  preface  to  St.  Luke's  Gospel 
declares  it  to  be  the  Evangelist's  intention  to  write  in  order — 
ypdif/ai  Ka6c£f)<s,  but  a  reader  could  not  go  far  without  finding 
out  that  Luke's  order  is  not  always  the  same  as  Mark's.  In 
the  very  first  chapter  of  St.  Mark  the  healing  of  Peter's  wife's 
mother  is  placed  after  the  Apostle's  call  to  become  a  fisher  of 
men,  in  opposition  to  Luke's  order.  It  is  on  this  difference 
of  order  that,  as  I  understand  the  matter,  Papias  undertook 
to  throw  light  by  his  traditional  anecdotes.  And  his  account 
of  the  matter  is  that  Mark  was  but  the  interpreter  of  Peter, 
whose  teaching  he  accurately  reported;  that  Peter  had  not 
undertaken  to  give  any  orderly  account  of  our  Lord's  words 
or  deeds  ;  that  he  only  delivered  these  instructions  from  time 
to  time  as  the  needs  of  his  people  required  ;  and  that  Mark 
was,  therefore,  guilty  of  no  falsification  in  faithfully  reporting 
what  he  had  heard. 

We  have  no  evidence  that  Papias's  notice  about  St.  Matthew 
occurred  in  the  same  context  as  that  about  St.  Mark ;  but  I 


VII.]  PAPIAS.  103 

think  it  likely  that  this  remark  was  also  made  in  explanation 
of  an  apparent  disagreement  between  the  first  Gospel  and 
one  of  the  others.  And  I  conceive  Papias's  solution  of  the 
difficulty  to  be,  that  the  Church  was  not  then  in  possession 
of  the  Gospel  as  Matthew  wrote  it— that  the  Greek  Matthew 
was  but  an  unauthorized  translation  from  a  Hebrew  original, 
which  each  one  had  translated  for  himself  as  he  could.  Thus, 
in  place  of  its  being  true  that  Papias  did  not  use  our  present 
Gospels,  I  believe  the  truth  to  be  that  he  was  the  first  who 
attempted  to  harmonize  them,  assuming  the  principle  that 
no  apparent  disagreement  between  them  could  affect  their 
substantial  truth. 

Thus,  then,  these  explanations  lead  to  the  same  inference 
as  the  use  of  the  word  Aoyta  in  speaking  of  St.  Matthew's 
Gospel ;  both  indicate  that  Papias  regarded  the  Gospels  as 
really  inspired  utterances.  When  he  finds  what  seems  a 
disagreement  between  the  Gospels,  he  is  satisfied  there  can 
be  no  real  disagreement.  Mark's  order  may  be  different  from 
Luke's ;  but,  then,  that  was  because  it  was  not  Mark's  design 
to  recount  the  facts  in  their  proper  order.  Three  times  over 
he  repeats  that  Mark  committed  no  error,  but  wrote  all  things 
truly.  If  in  Matthew's  Gospel,  as  he  read  it,  there  seemed 
any  inaccuracy,  this  must  be  imputed  to  the  translators  ;  the 
Gospel  as  Matthew  himself  wrote  it  was  free  from  fault. 

Weighing  these  things,  I  have  convinced  myself  that  Bishop , 
Lightfoot  has  given  the  true  explanation  of  a  passage,  from, 
which  ah  erroneous  inference  has  been  drawn.     Papias  de 
clares,  in  a  passage  which  I  have  already  cited,    i  If  I  met 
with  anyone  who  had  been  a  follower  of  the  elders  anywhere, 
I  made  it  a  point  to  inquire  what  were  the  declarations  of  the , 
elders,  what  was  said  by  Andrew,  by  Peter,  by  Philip,  what! 
by  Thomas  or  James,  what  by  John  or  Matthew,  or  any  other 
of  the  disciples  of  our  Lord,  and  the  things  which  Aristion' 
and  the  presbyter  John,  disciples  of  the  Lord,  say ;  for  I  did 
not  think  that  I  could  get  so  much  benefit  from  the  contents 
of  books  as  from   the   utterances  of  a    living   and   abiding 
voice.'     The  question  is  :  Does  this  disparagement  of  written  , 
books  extend  to  our  Gospels?     Are  we  to  suppose  that  Papias 
regarded  these  books,  if  he  had  them,  as  in  no  sense  inspired, ' 


104  THE    GOSPELS    IN    THE    EARLY   CHURCH.  [VII. 


at  he  preferred  to  obtain  his  knowledge  of  the  Saviour's 
earthly  life  from  viva  voce  tradition  ?  Considering  his  solici 
tude  to  clear  the  Gospels  from  all  charge  of  inaccuracy,  I  feel 
convinced  that  these  were  not  the  writings  which  he  found 
comparatively  useless  to  him  for  his  work.  The  title  of  his 
book  was,  as  I  understand  it,  'An  Exposition  of  the  Gospels;' 
and  it  was  in  seeking  for  traditions  to  supplement  and  illus 
trate  the  Scripture  history  that  he  found  it  useless  to  search 
the  Gnostic  interpretations*  then  current,  and  that  he  preferred 
his  own  collection  of  viva  voce  traditions,  whose  genuineness 
could,  as  he  alleged,  be  proved  by  tracing  them  up,  like  the 
I  four  Gospels,  to  the  Apostles  themselves. 

It  is  worth  while  to  take  notice  also  of  the  commencement 
of  the  preface  of  Papias  :  *  I  shall  not  scruple  also  to  place 
along  with  my  interpretations  anything  that  I  carefully  learned 
from  the  elders.'  Here  we  have  in  the  first  rank,  as  the  object 
of  Papias's  work,  expositions  of  the  oracles  of  our  Lord  —  inter 
pretations;  that  is  to  say,  he  assumes  an  existing  authoritative 
text,  on  which  he  comments,  and  which  he  tries  to  explain  ; 
and  then,  with  a  little  apology,  he  takes  leave  to  put  his 
traditions  forward  as  on  the  same  level  with  his  interpretations. 
But  neither  one  nor  the  other  seems  to  come  into  competition 
with  the  text.  Those  who  would  have  us  believe  that  Papias 
preferred  his  traditions  to  the  Evangelic  text  forget  that  he 
tells  us  the  two  things  —  that  he  was  in  possession  of  a  book 
written  by  Matthew,  and  that  he  also  made  it  his  business  to 
inquire  from  anyone  who  could  tell  him  what  Matthew  had 
said.  •  Papias  must  have  been  even  of  weaker  understanding 
than  Eusebitis  would  lead  us  to  think,  if  he  regarded  hearsay 
reports  as  better  evidence  what  were  the  statements  of  Matthew 
than  the  testimony  of  a  book  which  he  believed  to  have  been 
written  by  that  Apostle.  But  Papias  might  fairly  retort  the 
charge  of  stupidity  on  his  critics.  He  had  called  Matthew's 

*  Basilides,  apparently  a  contemporary  of  Papias,  is  said  to  have  written 
twenty-four  books  on  the  Gospel  (Euseb.  H.  E.  iv.  7).  Two  fragments 
of  these  Exegetica  have  been  preserved  :  one  by  Clement  of  Alexandria 
(Strom,  iv.  12),  the  other  in  the  'Acts  of  the  Disputation  of  Archelaus 
and  Manes'  (Routh,  Rell.  Sac.v.  196).  These  extracts  make  it  probable 
that  the  Gospel  of  St.  Luke  was  one  of  the  books  on  which  Basilides 
commented. 


VII.]  PAPIAS.     .  105 

book  the  '  Logia,'  and  his  own  book  an  interpretation  of 
'*  Logia.'  To  find  a  parallel  case,  then,  we  must  imagine  a 
writer  of  the  present  day  publishing  a  commentary  on  the 
•*  In  Memoriam,'  and  stating  in  his  preface  that  he  had  taken 
pains  to  question  everyone  that  he  met  with  who  had  conversed 
with  the  Laureate,  and  that  he  regarded  the  interpretations  he 
had  thus  been  able  to  collect  as  more  valuable  than  anything 
he  had  seen  in  print.  What  should  we  think  of  a  reviewer 
who,  reading  no  further  than  the  preface,  should  report  that 
the  author  maintained  that  none  of  the  printed  editions  of 
Tennyson's  Poems  could  be  relied  on,  and  that  he  attached 
no  value  to  anything  save  certain  stanzas  he  had  heard  in 
conversation  to  have  been  recited  by  the  poet  ? 

On  the  whole,  then,  I  arrive  at  the  conclusion  that  Papias 
recognized  an  Evangelic  text,  to  which  he  ascribed  the 
highest  authority,  and  in  the  perfect  accuracy  of  which  he 
had  strong  faith.  In  my  own  mind  I  have  no  doubt  that  this 
text  consisted  of  the  four  Gospels  we  now  have.  Papias  has 
named  two  of  his  Gospels,  those  of  St.  Matthew  and  St. 
Mark ;  and  I  see  no  ground  for  imagining  that  these  names 
totally  changed  their  signification  in  the  course  of  a  genera 
tion.  With  regard  to  the  use  of  St.  John's  Gospel  by  Papias, 
the  presumption  arising  from  his  confessed  use  of  the  First 
Epistle  is  confirmed  by  several  indications  in  the  list  of  names 
already  quoted.  Andrew  is  placed  before  Peter,  as  in  John 
i.  44  (compare  Mark  i.  29) ;  Philip  and  Thomas  are  selected 
for  mention,  who  have  no  prominence  except  in  St.  John's 
Gospel;  Matthew  and  John  are  coupled  together,  the  simplest 
•explanation  of  which  is  that  both  were  known  to  Papias  as 
authors  of  Gospels.  In  the  context  of  this  list,  Papias  calls 
our  Lord  by  the  Johannine  title  of  '  the  Truth.'  And  Light- 
foot  gives  strong  reasons  for  thinking  Papias  to  be  the  author 
of  a  passage  quoted  anonymously  by  Irenaeus,  and  which 
contains  a  quotation  from  St.  John.  Lightfoot's  reasons 
have  been  accepted  as  convincing  by  an  unprejudiced  critic, 
Harnack.  Of  Papias's  use  of  St.  Luke's  Gospel  I  have 
spoken  already,  and  we  shall  not  doubt  that  he  recognized 
this  Gospel  if  we  afterwards  find  reason  to  think  that  he  was 
acquainted  with  the  Acts  of  the  Apostles. 


106  THE    GOSPELS    IN   THE    EARLY   CHURCH.  [vil. 

If  still  earlier  evidence  than  that  of  Papias  is  required,  the 
only  difficulty  is  that  the  books  from  which  we  might  have 
drawn  our  testimony  have  perished.  The  extant  remains  of 
earlier  Christian  literature  are  few ;  and,  indeed,  it  is  likely 
that  the  first  generation  of  Christians,  among  whom  there 
were  not  many  learned,  and  who  were  in  constant  expectation 
of  their  Master's  second  coming,  did  not  give  birth  to  many 
books.  As  to  the  remains  we  do  possess,  I  avoid  burdening 
your  memory  with  too  many  details,  and  I  will  only  quote  a 
specimen  from  him  who  is  accounted  the  earliest  of  uninspired 
writers,  Clement  of  Rome,  in  order  to  show  the  kind  of  testi 
mony  which  those  who  are  known  as  the  Apostolic  Fathers 
afford  :  '  Remember  the  words  of  our  Lord  Jesus,  for  he  said, 
Woe  to  that  man  ;  it  were  better  for  him  that  he  had  not  been 
born  than  that  he  should  offend  one  of  my  elect.  It  were 
better  for  him  that  a  millstone  should  be  tied  about  his  neck,, 
and  that  he  should  be  drowned  in  the  sea,  than  that  he  should 
offend  one  of  my  little  ones '  (Clem.  Rom.  46).  Elsewhere  he 
says  :  '  Especially  remembering  the  words  of  our  Lord  Jesus, 
which  he  spake,  teaching  gentleness  and  long-suffering.  For 
thus  he  said,  Be  ye  merciful,  that  ye  may  obtain  mercy : 
forgive,  that  it  may  be  forgiven  to  you.  As  ye  do,  so  shall 
it  be  done  unto  you :  as  ye  give,  so  shall  it  be  given  unto 
you :  as  ye  judge,  so  shall  ye  be  judged :  as  ye  show  kind 
ness,  so  shall  kindness  be  shown  unto  you :  with  what 
measure  ye  mete,  with  the  same  shall  it  be  measured  unto 
you '  (Ch.  13).  Similar  quotations  are  found  in  the  Letters  of 
Polycarp  and  Ignatius,  but  the  passages  I  have  read  illustrate 
the  two  characteristics  of  these  early  citations — first,  that 
they  do  not  mention  the  name  of  the  source  whence  they 
are  taken ;  secondly,  that,  though  they  substantially  agree 
with  passages  in  our  present  Gospels,  they  do  not  do  so  lite 
rally  and  verbally.  There  are  two  questions,  then,  to  be 
settled — First :  Is  the  writer  quoting  from  a  written  source  at 
all,  or  is  he  merely  using  oral  traditions  of  our  Lord's  sayings 
and  doings  ?  Secondly :  Is  he  using  our  Gospels,  or  some 
other  record  of  our  Saviour's  life  ?  It  seems  to  me  that  the 
words  '  Remember  the  words  of  our  Lord  Jesus,'  when  ad 
dressed  to  the  members  of  a  distant  Church  who  had  received 


VII.]  CLEMENT    OF    ROME.  10y 

no  oral  instructions  from  the  writer,  point  distinctly,  not  to 
oral  tradition,  but  a  written  record,  which  Clement  could 
know  to  be  recognized  as  well  by  those  whom  he  was  addres 
sing  as  by  himself.  St.  Paul,  addressing  the  Ephesian  elders, 
might  say,  '  Remember  the  words  of  our  Lord  Jesus,  how  he 
said,  It  is  more  blessed  to  give  than  to  receive  '  (Acts  xx.  35 ), 
although  these  words  do  not  occur  in  our  Gospel  history, 
because  he  had  taught  for  three  years  in  Ephesus,  and  there 
fore  had  the  means  of  knowing  that  his  readers  had  heard 
the  same  words  before.  But  the  words,  '  Remember  the  words 
of  our  Lord  Jesus,'  when  addressed  to  men,  as  to  the  oral 
instruction  delivered  to  whom  the  writer  apparently  had  no 
means  of  knowledge,  point,  in  my  opinion,  plainly  to  written 
sources  of  information.  And  it  appears  to  me  unreasonable 
to  suppose  that  these  written  sources  of  information  were 
works  which  have  disappeared,  and  not  those  works  to  which 
we  find  testimonies  very  little  less  ancient  than  the  quotations 
to  which  I  refer,  and  which  contain  the  passages  cited,  the 
verbal  differences  not  exceeding  those  that  are  commonly 
found  in  memoriter  quotations.  I  have  already  spoken  of  the 
degree  of  accuracy  that  may  reasonably  be  looked  for  in  the 
memoriter  quotations  of  the  very  early  Fathers. 

But,  before  parting  with  the  Apostolic  Fathers,  I  must 
produce  a  passage  which  illustrates  the  skill  of  critics  in  re 
sisting  evidence  produced  to  prove  something  which  they 
have,  on  a  priori  grounds,  decided  not  to  admit.  There  are 
those  who  have  made  up  their  minds  that  the  Gospels  are 
comparatively  late  compositions,  and  who  are  certain  that 
they  could  not,  for  a  long  time,  have  been  looked  on  as 
inspired  or  treated  as  Scripture.  Now,  the  Epistle  of  Barna 
bas  is  a  work  which,  though  not  likely  to  have  been  written 
by  the  Apostle  Barnabas,  is  owned  on  all  hands  to  be  one  of 
great  antiquity,  dating  from  the  end  of  the  first  century,  or  at 
least  the  beginning  of  the  second,*  a  period  at  which,  accord 
ing  to  some  of  our  opponents,  St.  Matthew's  Gospel  was  per 
haps  not  written,  and  at  any  rate  could  not  yet  have  been 
counted  as  Scripture.  But  this  Epistle  contains  (c.  4)  the 

*  Hilgenfeld  dates  it  A.D.  97. 


108  THE    GOSPELS    IN    THE    EARLY   CHURCH.  [vil. 

exhortation,  '  Let  us  take  heed  lest,  as  it  is  written,  we  be 
found,  many  called,  but  few  chosen.'  Here  we  have  a  plain 
quotation  from  St.  Matthew,  introduced  with  the  well-known 
formula  of  Scripture  citation,  '  It  is  written.'  But  this  part 
of  the  Epistle  of  Barnabas  was  till  lately  only  extant  in  a 
Latin  translation ;  hence  it  was  said  that  it  was  impossible 
that  these  words,  '  It  is  written,'  could  have  been  in  the  ori 
ginal  Greek.  They  must  have  been  an  interpolation  of  the 
Latin  translator.  Hilgenfeld,  in  an  early  work,*  went  so  far 
as  to  admit  that  the  Greek  text  contained  some  formula  of 
citation,  but  he  had  no  doubt  it  must  have  been  *  as  Jesus 
says,'  or  some  such  like.  Unfortunately,  however,  lately  the 
Greek  text  of  this  portion  of  the  Epistle  of  Barnabas  came  to 
light,  being  part  of  the  newly- discovered  Sinaitic  Manuscript, 
and  there  stands  the  '  as  it  is  written,'  cos  yey/oaTrrai,  beyond 
mistake.  Then  it  was  suggested  that  the  quotation  is  not 
from  St.  Matthew,  but  from  the  second  book  of  Esdras. 
Now,  it  is  a  question  whether  this  book  is  not  post-Christian 
(as  certainly  some  portions  of  the  present  text  of  it  are),  and 
possibly  later  than  St.  Matthew — say  as  late  as  the  end  of 
the  first  century.  But  the  words  there  are,  '  Many  are  created, 
but  few  shall  be  saved.'  The  contention  that  the  words 
'  Many  are  called,  but  few  chosen,'  are  not  from  St.  Matthew, 
but  from  this  passage,  though  this  itself  may  have  been 
derived  from  our  Gospels,  is  only  a  proof  of  the  straits  to 
which  our  opponents  are  reduced.  Then  it  was  suggested 
that  the  quotation  was  perhaps  from  some  lost  apocryphal 
book.  And  lately  a  more  plausible  solution,  though  itself 
sufficiently  desperate,  has  been  discovered.  Scholtenf  sug 
gests  that  the  phrase  '  It  is  written '  was  used  by  Barnabas 
through  a  lapse  of  memory.  The  words  '  many  are  called, 
but  few  chosen,'  ran  in  his  head,  and  he  had  forgotten  where 
he  had  read  them,  and  fancied  it  was  somewhere  in  the  Old 
Testament.  I  think  this  is  an  excellent  illustration  of  the 
difficulty  of  convincing  a  man  against  his  will. 


*  «  Die  apostolischen  Vater,'  p.  48  (1853). 

+  Scholten  (born  181 1),  Emeritus  Professor  of  the  University  of  Ley  den, 
representative  of  the  extreme  school  of  revolutionary  criticism. 


(      I09     ) 


VIII. 


THE    SYNOPTIC    GOSPELS. 

PART    I . 

INTERNAL   EVIDENCE   OF   THEIR   ANTIQUITY. 

have  now  traced  back,  as  far  as  we  had  any  materials, 
the  history  of  the  reception  of  the  Gospels  in  the 
Church  ;  and  have  found  no  sign  that  the  existing  tradition 
concerning  their  authorship  has  ever  varied.* 

One  remark  I  must  make  as  to  what  that  tradition  exactly 
was.  Renan  observes  (p.  xvi)  that  the  formulae  'according 
to  Matthew,'  '  according  to  Mark,'  &c.,  indicate  that  the 
earliest  opinion  was,  not  that  these  stories  were  written  from 
one  end  to  the  other  by  Matthew,  Mark,  Luke,  and  John,  but 
only  that  they  contain  traditions  emanating  from  these  re 
spective  sources  and  guaranteed  by  their  authority.!  But 
assuredly  if  that  had  been  what  was  intended  by  the  phrase 
'  according  to,'  the  second  and  third  Gospels  would  have  been 
known  as  the  Gospel  according  to  Peter,  and  the  Gospel 
according  to  Paul.  The  account  of  Papias,  that  Mark  did 
nothing  but  record  narrations  of  Peter  concerning  our  Lord> 

*  The  student  who  desires  to  see  the  evidence  of  the  early  use  of  the 
Gospels  in  fuller  detail  will  find  valuable  assistance  in  Anger's  '  Synopsis.' 
It  is  an  arrangement  of  the  Evangelic  text  in  the  form  of  a  harmony,  and 
aims  at  giving  in  connexion  with  each  passage  any  illustrative  parallel  to  be 
found  in  writers  earlier  than  Irenaeus. 

f  I  observe  that  Renan  has  struck  this  sentence  out  of  his  later  editions, 
which,  I  suppose,  is  to  be  regarded  as  a  confession  that  the  argument  it 
contained  cannot  be  relied  on. 


110  THE    SYNOPTIC    GOSPELS.  [vill. 

was  received  with  general  belief  by  the  early  Church.*  And 
it  was  just  as  generally  believed  that  the  third  Gospel  rested 
on  the  authority  of  St.  Paul.  Irenaeus,  for  instance,  says  (in.  i.) 
— 'Paul's  follower,  Luke,  put  in  a  book  the  Gospel  preached 
by  him.'  Some  ancient  interpreters  even  understand  the 
phrase  'according  to  my  Gospel,'  which  occurs  in  the  Pauline 
Epistlesf  to  refer  to  the  Gospel  according  to  St.  Luke  (Euseb., 
H.  E.  iii.  4).  Clearly,  then,  if  the  phrase  'according  to*  had 
been  understood  to  imply  anything  less  than  actual  author 
ship,  the  Church  would  never  have  been  content  to  designate 
these  Gospels  by  the  names  of  those  who  transmitted  the 
tradition  at  second-hand,  but  would  have  named  them  more 
honourably  after  the  great  Apostles  on  whose  authority  they 
were  believed  to  rest.  It  is  plain,  then,  that  the  phrase  'the 
Gospel  according  to'  indicates  only  the  Church's  sense  of  the 
unity  of  the  fourfold  narrative,  the  same  good  tidings  being 
contained  in  all,  only  presented  differently  by  different  hands. 
Thus,  though  Justin  Martyr  uses  the  word  Gospel  in  the 
plural  number,  speaking  of  the  '  Memoirs '  that  are  called 
Gospels  (see  p.  65),  and  Irenaeus  also  speaks  of  four  Gospels, 
and  tries  to  prove  that  there  could  neither  be  more  nor 
fewer,  yet  the  use  is  quite  as  early  of  the  word  Gospel  in  the 
singular  number  to  denote  the  entire  record  of  the  Saviour's 
life.  Thus  we  find  in  Justin  Martyr,  '  the  precepts  in  what  is 
called  the  Gospel'  (Trypho,  c.  10),  'it  is  written  in  the 
Gospel'  (c.  100).  In  the  passage  of  Irenaeus  to  which  I 
have  just  referred,  though  he  does  occasionally  use  the  plural 
number,  yet  the  singular  prevails,  and  it  would  be  more 
accurate  to  state  his  thesis  as  '  The  Gospel  is  essentially  four 
fold,'  rather  than  as  '  There  can  be  only  four  Gospels.'  And 
he  habitually  uses  the  form  of  citation  '  as  it  is  written  in  the 
Gospel,' %  and  so  do  other  early  writers.  Clement  of  Alex- 


*  See  note,  p.  93.  Clement  states  (/.  c.}  that  the  tradition  which  had 
reached  him  was,  that  the  Gospels  containing  the  genealogies  had  been 
written  first,  and  that  Mark  afterwards  wrote  his  Gospel  at  Rome  at  the 
request  of  Peter's  hearers,  who  desired  to  have  a  permanent  record  of  the 
Gospel  orally  preached  by  that  Apostle ;  Peter  himself  not  interfering 
either  to  forbid  or  encourage  the  design. 

t  Rom.  ii.  16  ;  xvi.  25  ;  2  Tim.  ii.  8  ;  see  also  2  Thess.  ii.  14. 

J  For  example  :  n.  xxvi.  2  ;  in.  xxiii.  3  ;  IV.  xx.  6. 


VIII.]  THEIR    TITLES.  I  I  I 

andria  speaks  of  the  Law,  the  Prophets,  and  the  Gospel 
(Strom,  iii.  70;  iv.  2,  91).  Accordingly  the  earliest  MSS. 
represent  the  Gospels  not  as  four  separate  works,  but  as  one 
work  bearing  the  title  '  Gospel,'  divided  into  four  sections, 
' according  to  Matthew,'  'according  to  Mark,'  &c.  These 
were,  in  short,  but  the  forms  in  which  four  different  Evan 
gelists  had  committed  the  Gospel  to  writing.*  And  so  St. 
Augustine  speaks  of  'the  four  Gospels,  or  rather  the  four 
books  of  the  one  Gospel.' f 

The  titles  of  the  Gospels  regarded  in  another  point  of  view 
prove  their  own  historic  character.  If  they  had  been  arbi 
trarily  chosen,  we  may  be  sure  that  persons  of  greater 
distinction  in  the  history  of  the  Church  would  have  been 
selected.  Matthew  is  one  of  the  least  prominent  of  the 
Apostles,  and  the  dignity  of  Apostleship  is  not  even  claimed 
for  Mark  and  Luke.  It  would  have  been  so  easy  to  claim  a 
more  distinguished  authorship  for  the  Gospels,  that  we  have 
the  less  right  to  refuse  credence  to  what  is  actually  claimed, 
namely,  that  the  two  Evangelists  just  named,  though  not 
Apostles,  and  possibly  not  even  eyewitnesses  themselves, 
were  in  immediate  contact  with  Apostles  and  eyewitnesses. 

It  remains,  then,  to  test  this  tradition  by  internal  evidence. 
When  we  examine  the  Gospels  with  a  critical  eye,  do  we 
find  reason  to  think  that  they  cannot  be  so  early  as  the  date 
claimed  for  them,  viz.  the  first  age  of  the  Church — the  age 
when  Apostles  and  other  eyewitnesses  of  our  Saviour's 
ministry  were  still  alive  and  accessible  to  the  writers  of 
these  narratives?  If  we  reflect  for  a  moment  we  shall  be 
convinced  that  in  that  early  age  there  must  have  been  Gos 
pels:  if  not  the  Gospels  we  know,  at  least  some  other  Gospels. 
Two  things  may  be  regarded  as  certain  in  the  history  of  our 
religion:  first,  that  it  spread  with  extraordinary  rapidity — 
that  within  twenty  or  thirty  years  of  our  Lord's  death  the 
Gospel  had  travelled  far  outside  the  borders  of  Palestine,  so 
that  there  were  Christians  in  widely  separated  cities ;  and, 
secondly,  that  the  main  subject  of  the  preaching  of  every 

*  I  take  this  to  be  what  is  intended  in  the  account  of  Irenseus  (III.  i.) 
AOVKO.S  rb  UTT'  e/ceiVou  Kr^pvcro'ofj.evov  evayy€\iov  €V  fii$\i 
'Icoai/j/Tjs  Kal  avrbs  e|e5w/ce  rb  tvayyehiov  eV  'E<£eV<p  Siurpi/Suv. 

t  Tract  in  Joan,,  xxxvi.  vol.  ill.  543. 


112  THE    SYNOPTIC    GOSPELS. 

missionary  of  the  Church  was  Jesus  Christ.  Numerous  pas 
sages  will  rise  to  your  minds  in  which  the  work  of  these  first 
missionaries  is  described  as  'preaching  Christ.'  St.  Luke 
says  of  the  Apostles  at  Jerusalem,  'Daily  in  the  temple  and 
in  every  house  they  ceased  not  to  teach  and  preach  Jesus 
Christ'  (Acts  v.  42).  When  persecution  scattered  away  the 
disciples  from  Jerusalem,  St.  Luke  tells  us  of  those  who> 
came  to  Antioch  and  spoke  to  the  Grecians,  '  preaching  the 
Lord  Jesus '  (Acts  xi.  20).  '  We  preach  not  ourselves,'  says 
St.  Paul  (2  Cor.  iv.  5),  'but  Christ  Jesus  the  Lord.'  What 
ever  were  the  dissensions  in  the  early  Church,  of  which  we 
now  hear  so  much,  they  did  not  affect  this  point.  '  Some,'' 
says  St.  Paul  (Phil.  i.  15),  'preach  Christ  even  of  envy  and 
strife,  and  some  also  of  goodwill;'  but  'every  way,  whether 
in  pretence  or  in  truth,  Christ  is  preached.'  The  zeal  of  the 
first  disciples  made  every  Christian  a  missionary  into  what 
ever  town  he  went ;  and  the  work  of  the  missionary  was,  as  we 
have  seen,  to  preach  a  person.  Consequently  the  preacher 
must  have  been  prepared  to  answer  the  questions,  Who  was 
this  Jesus  whom  you  preach  ?  What  did  he  do  ?  What  did 
he  teach  ?  And  since  the  preachers  could  rarely  answer 
these  questions  from  their  personal  knowledge,  it  was  a 
necessity  for  their  work  that  they  should  be  furnished  with 
authentic  answers  resting  on  a  higher  authority  than  their 
own.  We  cannot  doubt,  then,  that  the  first  age  of  the  Church 
must  have  had  its  Gospels,  and  the  question  is  whether  we 
are  bound  to  reject  the  claim  of  these  books  of  ours  to  have 
been,  at  least,  among  the  number. 

When  I  discussed  the  external  evidences  to  the  Gospels, 
I  considered  all  four  together ;  for  my  judgment  is  that,  with 
respect  to  external  evidence,  there  is  no  appreciable  difference 
between  them.  But  the  internal  characteristics  of  the  fourth 
Gospel  are  so  different  from  those  of  the  other  three,  and  the 
special  objections  made  against  it  so  numerous,  that  it  will  be 
necessary  to  consider  this  Gospel  separately.  I  shall,  there 
fore,  now  speak  only  of  the  first  three,  commonly  called  the 
Synoptic  Gospels — a  title  which  is  so  well  established  that  it 
is  now  too  late  to  discuss  its  propriety.* 

*  The  idea  is  that  these  Gospels  agree  in  giving  one  synopsis  or  general 
view  of  the  same  series  of  events. 


VIII.]      THEIR   REPORT   OF   OUR    LORD'S   DISCOURSES.  113 

There  is  one  class  of  passages  in  these  Gospels  on  which 
the  stamp  of  antiquity  is  impressed  so  deeply  as  to  leave  no 
room  for  dispute :  I  mean  those  which  record  discourses  of 
our  Lord.  That  the  report  of  these  discourses  is  substantially 
accurate  no  unprejudiced  critic  can  doubt.  Renan  speaks  of 
the  '  naturalness,  the  ineffable  truth,  the  matchless  charm  of 
the  Synoptic  discourses  ;  their  profoundly  Hebrew  turn ;  the 
analogies  they  present  to  the  sayings  of  Jewish  doctors  of 
the  same  time;  their  perfect  harmony  with  the  scenery  of 
Galilee'  (p.  xxx).  Elsewhere  (p.  xxxvii)  he  says,  'A  kind  of 
brilliancy  at  once  mild  and  terrible,  a  divine  force,  underlines 
these  words,  if  I  may  say  so,  detaches  them  from  the  context, 
and  enables  the  critic  easily  to  recognize  them.'  '  The  true 
words  of  Jesus,  so  to  say,  reveal  themselves.  When  they  are 
touched  in  this  chaos  of  traditions  of  unequal  authenticity 
we  feel  them  vibrate.  They  come,  we  may  say,  spontaneously 
to  take  their  places  in  our  story,  where  they  stand  out  inf 
striking  relief.' 

Indeed,  I  need  hardly  quote  the  testimony  of  Renan  or  of 
anybody  else ;  for  we  have  sufficient  evidence  of  the  substan 
tial  truthfulness  of  the  Gospel  report  of  our  Lord's  discourses 
in  the  fact  that  in  all  Christian  literature  there  is  nothing 
like  them.  If,  instead  of  simply  reporting  these  discourses, 
the  first  disciples  had  invented  them,  they  could  have  invented 
something  else  of  the  same  kind.  Actually,  it  is  a  little  sur 
prising  that  the  men  who  were  so  deeply  impressed  by  our 
Lord's  teaching,  and  who  so  fully  imbibed  the  spirit  of  it, 
should  never  have  attempted  to  imitate  its  form.  In  point  of 
style,  we  travel  into  a  new  country  when  we  pass  from  the 
Synoptic  Gospels  to  the  Apostolic  Epistles.  Those  who 
heard  our  Lord's  parables,  and  who  could  not  fail  to  have 
been  struck  by  their  beauty,  and  by  the  force  with  which  they 
brought  to  the  mind  the  lessons  they  were  meant  to  convey, 
never,  as  far  as  we  know,  used  the  same  method  of  impressing 
any  lessons  of  their  own.  Among  early  uninspired  Christian 
writers  there  were  several  imitators  of  the  Apostolic  Epistles, 
but  only  one,  Hermas,  who  attempted  to  imitate  the  parables, 
and  that  with  such  poor  success  that  we  need  the  less  wonder 
that  others  did  not  try  the  experiment. 

i 


114  THE    SYNOPTIC    GOSPELS.  [vill. 

Thus  we  see,  that  if  tradition  had  been  silent,  criticism 
would  have  told  us  the  story  that  tradition  now  tells :  '  There 
are  things  here  which  must  either  have  been  written  down  by 
men  who  heard  Jesus  of  Nazareth  speak,  or  else  by  men  who 
faithfully  transmitted  the  account  given  to  them  by  the  actual 
hearers.'  And  we  have  every  reason  also  to  think  that  no 
great  time  could  have  elapsed  before  the  recollections  of  our 
Lord's  teaching  were  reduced  to  a  permanent  form.  Cer 
tainly  those  who  exclude  miracle,  and  who  look  upon  our 
Lord  merely  as  an  eminent  teacher,  cannot  otherwise  account 
for  the  substantial  faithfulness  of  the  evangelistic  record  of 
His  discourses.  A  few  detached  aphorisms  of  a  great  teacher 
may  be  carried  by  the  memory  for  some  time,  and  be  passed 
on  from  one  to  another ;  but  discourses  of  the  length  we  find 
in  the  Gospels  would,  in  the  ordinary  course  of  things,  have 
perished,  if  they  had  not  been  from  the  first  either  committed 
to  writing,  or,  if  committed  to  memory,  kept  alive  by  constant 
repetition.  It  is  surprising  how  little  of  spoken  words  ordi 
nary  memories  are  able  to  retain.  I  believe  that  anyone  who 
has  been  much  in  the  company  of  a  distinguished  man  will, 
on  his  death,  be  astonished  to  find  how  extremely  little  in  the 
way  of  reminiscences  of  his  conversation  he  will  be  able  to 
recall.  If  Boswell  has  been  able  to  give  a  vivid  representa 
tion  of  Dr.  Johnson's  Table-Talk,  it  is  because  he  used  to 
stand  behind  the  chair  of  the  object  of  his  veneration,  with 
note-book  in  hand.  And  it  was  in  the  same  way  that  Luther's 
Table-Talk  was  preserved.  It  is  quite  true  that  some  memo 
ries  are  exceptionally  retentive,  and  true  also  that  the  words 
of  Jesus  were  of  surpassing  interest.  All  however  that  follows 
from  this  is,  that  it  is  not  necessary  to  conclude  that  our 
Lord's  discourses  were  written  down  in  His  own  lifetime: 
but  it  seems  to  me  not  rational  to  suppose  that,  if  any  long 
time  had  passed  after  the  day  of  Pentecost  before  his  dis 
courses  were  reduced  to  a  permanent  form,  they  could  have 
been  preserved  to  us  with  so  much  faithfulness  and  so  much 
purity. 

Nor  do  I  think  that  the  case  is  altered  when  we  look  at 
the  matter  from  a  Christian  point  of  view.  We  believe  that 
'the  Apostles  were  aided  by  the  Holy  Spirit,  who  brought  to 


VIII.]      THEIR    REPORT    OF   OUR   LORD'S    DISCOURSES.  115 

their  memories  the  things  that  Jesus  had  said.     But  we  have 
no  reason  to  think  that  this  assistance  was  bestowed  on  such 
terms  as  to   relieve  them  from  the  duty  of  taking  ordinary 
precautions  for  the  preservation  of  what  was  thus  recalled  to! 
their  minds. 

I  hold  it,  then,  to  be  certain  that  the  existing  Gospels  con 
tain  elements  which  are,  in  the  highest  sense  of  the  word, 
Apostolic  ;  and  the  present  question  is,  Are  we  to  confine 
this  character  to  that  part  of  them  which  records  our  Lord's 
discourses  ?  Are  we  to  suppose  that  the  Apostles  carefully 
remembered  and  accurately  reported  what  Jesus  said,  and 
that  they  neglected  the  easier  task  of  recording  what  he  did  ? 
or  was  this  a  point  on  which  their  hearers  would  not  be 
curious  for  information?  No  one  can  answer  this  or  any 
other  historical  question  rightly  who  projects  his  own  feel 
ings  into  the  minds  of  men  who  lived  centuries  ago.  A 
nineteenth-century  critic  may  be  deeply  impressed  by  the 
excellence  and  beauty  of  the  moral  teaching  ascribed  to  Jesus 
of  Nazareth.  He  very  willingly  grants  that  it  would  be  in 
conceivable  that  four  illiterate  Jews  should  each  indepen 
dently  arrive  at  a  degree  of  wisdom  far  surpassing  that 
obtained  by  any  other  of  their  nation ;  and  so  he  may  readily 
accept  their  own  account  of  the  matter,  namely,  that  all  had 
obtained  their  wisdom  from  one  common  source.  But 
the  modern  critic  does  not  care  to  hear  of  miracles  ;  and 
he  would,  if  possible,  prefer  to  believe  that  one  in  other 
respects  so  admirable  as  Jesus  had  made  no  pretensions  to 
supernatural  power.  But  it  is  absurd  to  imagine  that  this  was 
the  frame  of  mind  of  the  first  disciples.  Who  can  conceive 
of  them  as  men  only  solicitous  to  hear  what  had  been  the 
words  of  Jesus,  and  indifferent  to  the  report  of  His  works  ? 
I  have  said  that  the  first  Christian  missionaries  summarized 
their  work  as  '  preaching  Christ.'  And  if  we  look  at  the 
specimens  of  their  teaching,  whether  as  presented  in  the 
book  of  the  Acts  or  in  the  unquestioned  Apostolic  Epistles, 
we  see  that  this  meant  far  less  preaching  what  Christ  had 
said  than  what  He  had  done.  The  character  in  which  He  is1 
presented  is  not  that  of  a  wise  moral  teacher,  but  of  one 
'  anointed  with  the  Holy  Ghost  and  with  power,  who  wentl 

I  2 


Il6  THE    SYNOPTIC    GOSPELS.  [vill. 

about  doing  good,  and  healing  all  that  were  oppressed  with 
the  devil.'  Look  at  any  of  the  places  in  the  Epistles  where 
the  word  Gospel  is  used,  and  you  will  see  that  *  preaching 
the  Gospel'  meant  telling  the  story  of  the  life  and  death  and 
resurrection  of  our  Lord.  It  follows  then  (without  taking 
into  account  the  fact  that  many  of  our  Lord's  sayings  would 
not  have  been  intelligible  without  an  explanation  of  the  cir 
cumstances  under  which  they  were  spoken)  that  we  cannot 
reasonably  believe  that  those  who  preserved  a  record  of  our 
Lord's  words  did  not  also  relate  something  of  His  acts.  In 
point  of  fact,  our  three  Synoptic  Gospels  contain  a  common 
element,  which  includes  deeds  as  well  as  words  of  Christ;  and 
the  only  satisfactory  account  of  this  common  element  is,  that 
it  represents  an  apostolic  tradition  used  by  all  three. 

Later  on  I  shall  have  to  say  a  little  as  to  the  theories  that 
have  been  framed  to  explain  the  mutual  relations  of  the 
Synoptic  Gospels:  theories  which  propose  to  account  as  well 
for  their  substantial  agreement  as  for  their  variations  in  detail. 
At  present  I  am  concerned  with  the  coincidences  between  the 
three  narratives  which  are  altogether  too  numerous  to  be 
referred  to  chance.  They  agree  in  the  main  in  their  selection 
of  facts — all  travelling  over  nearly  the  same  ground  ;  though 
independent  narrators  would  be  sure  to  have  differed  a  good 
deal  In  their  choice  of  subjects  for  narration  out  of  a  public 
life  of  three  years.  In  point  of  fact  we  do  find  exactly 
such  a  difference  between  the  life  of  our  Lord  as  related  by 
St.  John  and  by  the  Synoptics.  These  last  agree  in  the  main 
in  the  order  of  their  narrative;  and  in  many  cases  they  tell 
the  story  in  almost  identical  words.  If  these  coincidences  of 
language  only  occurred  in  the  report  of  our  Lord's  discourses, 
they  would  not  afford  much  ground  for  remark;  though  even 
in  that  case,  before  we  could  assert  the  perfect  independence 
of  the  reporters,  we  should  have  to  inquire  in  what  language 
our  Lord  spoke.  If  He  spoke  in  Aramaic,  different  indepen 
dent  translators  of  His  words  into  Greek  would  not  be  likely  to 
coincide  not  only  in  words*  but  in  grammatical  constructions. 

*  As  an  example  how  likely  independent  translators  are  to  differ  in  their 
choice  of  words,  compare  the  following  two  translations  given  in  the 
Authorized  Version  for  the  same  Greek  words :  '  The  scribes  which  love 


VIII.]  THEIR    REPORT    OF   OUR    LORD'S   ACTIONS.  117 

If  we  were  to  consider  nothing  more  than  the  fact  that  in 
Aramaic  there  are  but  two  tenses,  and  in  Greek  a  great  many, 
we  see  that  the  translator  into  Greek  of  an  Aramaic  sentence, 
even  if  he  were  left  no  choice  as  to  the  words  he  was  to 
employ,  would  still  have  great  liberty  of  choice  as  to  the 
grammatical  structure  of  his  sentence.  But  although  the 
greater  number  of  coincidences  naturally  occur  in  the  report 
of  our  Lord's  discourses,  which  every  narrator  would  be 
anxious  to  repeat  in  the  very  words  in  which  they  had  been 
delivered  to  him;  yet  there  are,  besides,  so  many  cases  where, 
in  the  relation  of  incidents,  the  same  words  are  employed 
by  different  Evangelists,  that  it  would  be  a  defiance  of  all 
probability  to  ascribe  these  coincidences  to  chance.*  Yet, 
with  all  these  agreements,  there  is  so  much  diversity,  as  to 
suggest  the  idea  to  orthodox  and  sceptical  critics  alike,  that 
we  have  here  recastings  by  three  later  hands  of  one  original 
Gospel.  The  difference  is  just  this,  that  while  the  orthodox 
critic  makes  the  original  Gospel  proceed  from  apostolic  lips 
or  pen,  and  ascribes  the  recastings,  if  we  may  call  them  so, 
to  men  who  were  in  immediate  contact  with  the  Apostles ; 
sceptical  critics  place  their  original  Gospel  at  about  the  same 
date  that  we  assign  to  the  present  form  of  the  Gospel ;  while 
to  the  latter  they  assign,  with  one  consent,  a  date  later  than 
Papias ;  and  many  of  them,  owing  to  a  blunder,  of  which  I 
have  already  told  you,  place  the  death  of  Papias  as  late  as 
A.D.  165. 

I  have  already  argued  that  the  external  tradition  as  to  the 
authorship  of  a  book,  if  well  confirmed,  is  entitled  to  much 
respect,  and  is  not  liable  to  be  displaced  unless  confuted  by 
internal  evidence.  Now,  the  mere  fact  that  criticism  can 
discover  in  the  Gospels  traces  of  a  still  older  original  is  no 

to  go  in  long  clothing,  and  love  salutations  in  the  market  places  and  the 
chief  seats  in  the  Synagogues,  and  the  uppermost  rooms  at  feasts,  which 
for  a  pretence  make  long  prayers.' — St.  Mark  xii.  38.  '  The  scribes  which 
desire  to  walk  in  long  robes,  and  love  greetings  in  the  markets,  and  the 
highest  seats  in  the  Synagogues,  and  the  chief  rooms  at  feasts  :  which  for 
a  shew  make  long  prayers.' — St.  Luke  xx.  46. 

*  Here  are  two  examples  :  '  His  hand  was  restored,'  aTre/careo'Ttier/  77 
X*tp  avrov  (Mark  iii.  5  ;  Luke  vi.  10 :  Matt.  xii.  13);  'Let  it  out  to  hus 
bandmen  and  went  into  a  far  country.'  e|e'8oTo  avrbv  yecapyo'is  xal 
(Matt.  xxi.  33  ;  Mark  xii.  I ;  Luke  xx.  9). 


Il8  THE    SYNOPTIC   GOSPELS.  [VIII. 

proof  whatever  that  they  are  not  of  the  antiquity  that  has 
been  claimed  for  them.     Give  them  that  date,  and  there  still 
remains  room  for  an  earlier  original ;  while  I  hope  to  show 
you  that  there  is  not  room   for  any  later  recasting.     But  I 
must  first  remark  that  the  concessions  which  the  later  school 
of  sceptical  critics  has  been  forced  to  make  have  evacuated 
the  whole  field  in  which  critical  science  has  a  right  to  assert 
itself  against  tradition.    We  can  well  believe  that  there  would 
be  considerable  differences  between  a  document  written  in 
A.D.  60  and  in    160  ;   and,  therefore,   if  the  question  were 
between  two  such  dates,  one  who  judged  only  by  internal 
evidence  might  be  justified  in  maintaining  his  opinion  in 
opposition  to   external  evidence.      But  now  that  all  sober 
criticism  has  abandoned  the  extravagantly  late  dates  which  at 
one  time  were  assigned  to  the  Gospels,  the  difference  between 
the  contending  parties  becomes  so  small,  that  mere  criticism 
cannot  without  affectation  pretend  to  be  competent  to  give 
a  decision.     Take,  for  example,  the  difference  between  an 
orthodox  critic,  who  is  willing  to  believe  that   the   fourth 
Gospel  was  written  by  the  Apostle  John  in  extreme  old  age, 
towards  the  end  of  the  first  century,  and  a  sceptical  critic  of 
the  moderate  school,  who  is  willing  to  allow  it  to  have  been 
written  early  in  the  second  century.    It  seems  to  me  that  this 
difference  is  smaller  than  criticism  can  reasonably  pronounce 
upon.     For  I  count  it  unreasonable  to  say  that  it  is  credible 
a  book  should  have  been  written  eighty  years  after  our  Lord's 
death,  and  incredible  it  should  have  been  written  only  sixty ; 
when  we  have  scarcely  any  documentary  evidence  as  to  the 
history  of  the  Church,  or  the  progress  of  Christian  thought 
during  the  interval.     So  I  think  that  the  gradual  approaches 
which  Baur's  successors  have  been  making  to  the  traditional 
theory  indicate  that  criticism  will  in  the  end  find  itself  forced 
to  acquiesce  in  the  account  of  the  origin  of  the  Gospels  which 
the  Church  has  always  received. 

Let  us  examine,  then,  the  Church  account  of  the  origin  of 
the  Gospels,  and  see  whether  there  is  anything  in  it  which 
what  we  know  of  the  histoiy  of  the  period  gives  us  a  right  to 
pronounce  improbable.  Although  there  is  no  evidence  that 
the  existing  Gospels  have  suffered  material  change  since 


VIII.]  THEIR    PREDECESSORS.  119 

their  first  composition,  or  that  our  present  Matthew  and 
Mark  differ  from  the  original  Matthew  and  Mark,  of  whom 
German  writers  speak  so  much ;  yet  it  is  not  asserted  that 
these  Gospels  of  ours  had  no  predecessors.  St.  Luke  tells  us 
that  he  was  not  the  first  to  write  a  Gospel  ;  nay,  that  many 
before  him  had  taken  in  hand  to  set  forth  in  order  a  declara 
tion  of  the  things  most  certainly  believed  among  Christians. 
What,  then,  has  become  of  these  predecessors  of  our  Gos 
pels  ?  How  is  it  that  they  have  so  utterly  vanished  out  of 
existence  ? 

That  there  are  extant  apocryphal  Gospels  you  have  doubt 
less  heard.  In  another  lecture  I  hope  to  give  some  account 
of  them.  Suffice  it  now  to  say,  that  none  of  them  is  imagined 
by  critics  of  any  school  to  be  earlier  than  our  four,  because 
the  shortest  inspection  of  them  shows  that  they  presuppose 
and  acknowledge  the  Canonical.  Accordingly,  when  Tisch- 
endorf  maintained  that  the  present  apocryphal  Gospel  of 
St.  James  was  known  to  Justin  Martyr,  and  that  the  Gospel 
of  Nicodemus  represents  the  Acts  of  Pilate,  probably  current 
in  the  second  century,  such  a  theory  was  loudly  protested 
against  by  sceptical  critics,  because  these  documents  presup 
pose  respectively  the  Gospels  of  Matthew  and  John,  which, 
therefore,  must  have  been  much  earlier.  The  choice  of  sub 
jects  in  the  apocryphal  Gospels  is  enough  to  show  that  they 
did  not  proceed  from  independent  tradition.  It  is  a  conceiv 
able  thing  that  since  our  Lord,  after  He  had  become  famous, 
had  crowds  of  hearers  about  Him,  others  besides  the  Apostles 
might  commit  to  writing  their  recollections  of  His  words  and 
deeds  :  so  that  if  the  apocryphal  Gospels  had  purported  to 
give  an  account  of  our  Lord's  public  ministry,  it  might  at 
least  deserve  an  examination  whether  they  do  not  perchance 
contain  some  genuine  traditions.  But  that  they  proceeded 
from  invention,  not  from  tradition,  is  shown  by  the  fact  that 
they  are  silent  on  those  parts  of  our  Lord's  life  about  which 
traditions  might  be  expected  to  exist.  They  rather  under 
take  to  fill  up  the  gaps  of  the  Gospel  history,  to  tell  us  the 
history  of  Joseph  and  Mary  previous  to  their  marriage,  or 
the  events  of  the  Saviour's  infancy  or  childhood.  No  doubt, 
Christians  would  naturally  be  curious  for  information  about 


120  THE   SYNOPTIC    GOSPELS.  [VIII. 

these  topics,  and,  finding  the  Gospels  silent,  might  be  pre 
pared  to  welcome  some  answer  to  their  questions  from 
anyone  who  professed  to  be  able  to  give  it.  But  nothing  is 
more  intrinsically  improbable  than  that  anyone  should  possess 
trustworthy  information  on  such  points  as  these  who  could 
add  nothing  to  the  Gospel  history  of  the  deeds  and  words  of 
our  Saviour  after  He  became  a  public  teacher. 

Acknowledging,  then,  that  no  Gospel  earlier  than  the 
Canonical  is  now  extant,  we  have  to  ask,  Did  the  Church 
formally  select  our  four  from  the  mass  of  evangelical  tradi 
tion  ;  and  was  it  in  consequence  of  the  pre-eminence  given  to 
these  by  the  force  of  authority  that  the  others  then  disap 
peared  ?  Not  so  :  it  is  a  remarkable  fact  that  we  have  no 
early  interference  of  Church  authority  in  the  making  of  a 
Canon  ;  no  Council  discussed  this  subject ;  no  formal  deci 
sions  were  made.  The  Canon  seems  to  have  shaped  itself ; 
and  if,  when  we  come  further  on,  you  are  disposed  to  com 
plain  of  this  because  of  the  vagueness  of  the  testimony  of 
antiquity  to  one  or  two  disputed  books,  let  us  remember  that 
this  non-interference  of  authority  is  a  valuable  topic  of  evi 
dence  to  the  genuineness  of  our  Gospels  ;  for  it  thus  appears 
that  it  was  owing  to  no  adventitious  authority,  but  by  their 
own  weight,  that  they  crushed  all  rivals  out  of  existence. 
Whence  could  they  have  had  this  weight  except  from  its 
being  known  that  the  framers  of  these  Gospels  were  men 
of  superior  authority  to  the  others,  or  with  access  to  fuller 
information  ? 

Accept  Luke's  account  of  the  matter  as  given  in  the  pre 
face  to  his  Gospel  and  in  the  Acts,  and  all  is  plain.  He  tells 
us  at  the  beginning  of  the  Acts  that  the  qualification  necessary 
in  one  to  be  added  to  the  apostolic  body  was,  that  he  should 
have  companied  with  the  Apostles  all  the  time  that  our  Lord 
went  in  and  out  among  them,  beginning  from  the  baptism  of 
John  until  the  day  that  He  was  taken  up.  And  although  it  is 
stated  that  the  specific  object  of  this  was  in  order  that  the 
person  chosen  might  give  witness  of  the  Resurrection  ;  yet 
the  qualification  itself  implies  that  it  was  the  special  function 
of  an  Apostle  to  bear  witness  to  the  whole  public  life  of  our 
Lord,  from  His  baptism  to  His  ascension.  Even  if  it  had 


VIII.]  THEIR    PREDECESSORS.  121 

not  been  the  official  duty  of  an  Apostle  to  bear  this  testimony, 
who  can  suppose  that  the  eager  curiosity  of  Christians  for 
authentic  information  concerning  the  early  life  of  Him,  on 
whom  their  whole  faith  was  built,  could  leave  unquestioned 
the  men  who  had  been  His  intimate  companions  ; — men, 
moreover,  who  had  the  promise  of  His  Spirit  to  bring  to 
their  recollection  the  things  that  Jesus  had  said  to  them? 
It  could  not  be,  therefore,  but  that  each  Apostle  would  be 
frequently  called  on  to  repeat  the  story  of  the  things  which 
Jesus  had  said  or  done.  Nothing  would  be  more  probable 
than  that,  on  repetition  he  should  tell  the  story  nearly  in  the 
same  way.  Yet  we  cannot  well  suppose  that  the  Apostle 
would  at  first  give  one  continuous  narrative,  intended  to 
embrace  all  that  Jesus  had  said  or  done.  He  would  be  more 
likely,  as  Papias  tells  in  the  case  of  St.  Peter,  to  give  the  ac 
counts  of  separate  incidents,  as  the  wants  of  his  hearers  made 
it  expedient  that  this  or  that  history  should  be  related.  Now, 
nothing  would  be  more  probable  also,  than  that  those  who 
heard  these  sacred  narratives,  and  desired,  as  every  Christian 
would,  to  preserve  the  memory  of  them,  should  write  down 
what  they  had  heard  ;  and  the  next  step  would  be  to  frame 
such  detached  accounts  into  an  orderly  narrative.  This  is 
what  I  understand  from  Luke's  Preface,  that  before  him 
many  had  taken  in  hand  to  do  ; — not  to  write  from  their  own 
resources  a  life  of  Christ,  but  merely  to  arrange  into  an 
orderly  story  (di/ara£ao-#at  Stryy^criv)  the  things  which  had 
been  orally  delivered  to  them  by  those  who  were  from  the 
beginning  eyewitnesses  and  ministers  of  the  Word.  And 
this,  which  they  had  undertaken  to  do,  Luke,  who  claims  to 
be  possessor  of  more  complete  and  accurate  knowledge,  also 
undertakes  to  do  (ypanj/at  /catfe^s),  that  so  Theophilus  might 
have  certain  knowledge  of  the  things  in  which  he  had  been 
instructed. 

It  is  easy  to  conceive  that  when  Luke  had  performed  his 
task,  his  work  was  recognized  as  so  much  more  full,  and  so 
much  more  trustworthy  than  most  previous  arrangements  of 
the  apostolic  traditions,  that  no  one  tried  to  preserve  these 
abortive  attempts.  Similarly,  if  Matthew's  Gospel  and  Mark's 
were  written  by  the  persons  to  whom  we  ascribe  them,  we  can 


122  THE    SYNOPTIC    GOSPELS.  [vill. 

understand  how  they  at  once  superseded  attempts  to  supply 
the  same  want  made  by  men  of  less  estimation  in  the  Church. 
But  all  the  facts  lead  us  to  the  conclusion  that  these  Gospels, 
which  have  absorbed  all  other  attempts  to  commit  our  Lord's 
teaching  to  writing,  must  have  been  of  so  early  a  date,  that 
no  previous  Gospel  had  had  time  to  gain  an  established  repu 
tation,  and  that  they  must  have  been  written  by  men  holding 
in  the  Church  some  position  of  distinction. 

We  may  draw  what  I  think  is  a  strong  proof  of  the  anti 
quity  of  our  Gospels  from  the  absence  of  all  authentic  tradi 
tion  as  to  the  manner  of  their  first  publication.  Such  tradition 
would  be  very  welcome  if  it  could  be  had,  and  might  help  us 
to  a  solution  of  several  difficulties.  For  instance,  there  are 
verses  wanting  from  some  early  manuscripts  of  the  Gospels 
which  internal  evidence  strongly  disposes  us  to  pronounce 
genuine,  and  yet  which  we  find  it  hard  to  conceive  that  any 
transcriber  would  leave  out,  who  found  them  in  the  text  he 
had  to  copy.  So  the  idea  suggests  itself,  Is  it  not  possible 
that  the  Evangelist  may  have  published  more  than  one  edition 
of  his  Gospel,  so  that  each  of  the  types  of  manuscript  repre 
sents  a  genuine  text;  the  shorter  representing  the  first  edition 
of  the  Gospel,  the  fuller  representing  the  text  as  subsequently 
completed  by  genuine  additions  made  by  the  Evangelist  him 
self  ?  But  no  tradition  is  early  enough  to  throw  any  light  on 
such  a  hypothesis,  either  in  the  way  of  confirmation  or  refuta 
tion.  At  the  latter  part  of  the  second  century,  which  is  the 
first  date  from  which  Christian  writings  in  any  abundance 
have  been  preserved  to  us,  it  is  evident  no  more  was  known 
on  the  subject  than  is  known  now.  The  publication  of  the 
Gospels  dated  from  a  time  of  then  immemorial  antiquity. 
There  sprang  up  a  belief  that  Matthew  had  published  his 
Gospel  in  Palestine,  Mark  in  Italy,  Luke  in  Greece  ;  and  at  a 
later  period,  John  in  Asia-Minor,  by  way  of  supplement  to 
the  previous  histories.  It  is  by  no  means  incredible  that  the 
fact  that  we  have  three  versions  of  our  Lord's  life,  with  so 
much  in  common,  may  have  arisen  from  independent  publi 
cation  at  different  places  at  nearly  the  same  time ;  but  any 
tradition  on  the  subject  is  too  late  for  us  to  build  much  on  it. 
If  any  traditions  deserve  respect  they  are  those  of  Papias, 


VIII.]  NECESSITY    FOR   WRITTEN   GOSPELS.  12$ 

who  made  it  his  business  to  collect  them,  and  who  was  com 
paratively  early  in  date  ;  but  even  Papias  is  too  late  to  give  us 
much  help  in  solving  the  difficulties  which  the  question  of  the 
origin  of  the  Gospels  presents. 

In  the  absence,  then,  of  any  contemporary  testimony  as  to 
the  manner  of  publication  of  the  Gospels,  or  as  to  the  exist 
ence  of  any  form  of  them  different  from  what  we  have  now, 
we  have  tried  to  examine  whether  there  is  anything  opposed 
to  probability  in  what  tradition  does  assert,  namely,  that  the 
books  were  written  either  by  Apostles  or  companions  of  the 
Apostles.  We  have  seen  that  the  admission  of  this  author 
ship  still  leaves  an  interval  between  the  first  publication  of 
the  Gospel  story  and  the  existing  record,  quite  long  enough 
to  afford  room  for  explaining  the  phenomena  which  the  actual 
texts  present.  The  question  with  which  we  have  now  to  deal 
is,  Can  we  reasonably  go  later  ?  How  long  could  the  Chris 
tian  world  manage  to  do  without  authoritative  Gospels  ?  I 
answer,  Not  long  after  the  first  outburst  of  missionary  zeal, 
and  the  consequent  foundation  of  Churches  distant  from 
Jerusalem.  Remember  what  I  said  just  now,  that  there  was 
a  time  before  the  word  'Gospel'  denoted  the  name  of  a  book : 
the  Gospel  then  signified  the  subject  of  the  preaching  of  every 
Christian  missionary,  and  that  was  in  two  words — Jesus 
Christ.  It  was  because  it  told  the  story  of  Jesus  Christ  that 
the  Book  of  Matthew,  or  John,  or  Mark,  or  Luke,  came  to  be 
called  the  Gospel.  We  know  from  the  first  detailed  account 
of  the  Christian  weekly  meetings  for  worship — that  given  by 
Justin  Martyr — that  the  reading  of  the  story  of  Jesus  Christ 
was  part  of  the  stated  business  of  these  meetings.  How  early 
are  we  to  date  the  origin  of  this  practice  ?  We  have  only  our 
sense  of  historical  probability  to  guide  us.  But  take  these 
five  documents,  which  Baur  does  not  question — four  Epistles 
of  St.  Paul,  and  the  Apocalypse— and  gather  from  them  what 
the  early  Church  thought  of  Jesus  Christ,  and  I  feel  you  will 
be  persuaded  that  to  tell  of  Him  must,  from  the  first,  have 
been  the  business  of  every  Christian  preacher.  If  a  Church 
were  presided  over  by  Apostles  or  others  who  had  first-hand 
knowledge  of  the  facts,  such  presidents  would  be  able  to  tell 
all  that  was  necessary  from  their  personal  recollections,  un- 


124  THE    SYNOPTIC    GOSPELS.  [vill. 

assisted  by  any  written  record.  But  what  would  happen  when 
the  apostolic  preachers  who  had  founded  a  new  Church  went 
away  ?  The  first  expedient,  no  doubt,  would  be  to  leave  in 
charge  of  it  a  disciple  who  had  been  thoroughly  trained  and 
catechized,  and  so  might  be  trusted  to  give  the  people  the 
lessons  of  which  they  had  need.  But  with  the  multiplication 
of  Churches  it  would  become  more  and  more  difficult  to  find 
persons  possessing  that  long  familiarity  with  the  facts  which 
would  qualify  them  for  this  task. 

It  is  indeed  a  point  in  which  modern  missions  contrast 
with  apostolic  missions,  that  in  our  day  the  formation  of  a 
native  ministry  is  of  slow  growth,  and  in  most  places  where 
congregations  have  been  gathered  from  the  heathen,  the 
majority  of  the  teachers  are  furnished  by  the  Church  which 
sent  forth  the  first  missionaries.  But  in  the  apostolic  days, 
soon  after  the  first  burst  of  missionary  effort,  and  the  preach 
ing  of  the  Gospel  in  foreign  cities,  we  read  of  the  Apostles 
ordaining  Elders  in  every  city  How  were  these  new  Elders 
to  be  supplied  with  the  knowledge  their  office  required  ?  The 
obvious  remedy  would  be,  that  men  who  knew  the  story  well 
should  commit  it  to  writing  for  the  benefit  of  a  new  genera 
tion  of  teachers.  Have  we  any  cause  to  pronounce  it  unlikely 
that  such  a  remedy  should  be  adopted?  We  are  not  speaking 
of  a  pre-historic  age  like  that  of  the  composition  of  the 
Homeric  poems,  in  the  case  of  which  it  maybe  deemed  more 
probable  that  ballads  should  pass  on  from  mouth  to  mouth, 
than  that  they  should  be  preserved  by  the  then  unknown  or 
unfamiliar  art  of  writing.  We  have  to  do  with  a  literary  age. 
If  we  want  to  know  what  amount  of  literary  culture  was  pos 
sessed  by  the  first  Christian  Churches,  we  have,  in  Paul's 
unquestioned  Epistles,  specimens  of  the  communications 
that  passed  between  a  Christian  missionary  and  his  converts. 
Can  anyone  read  these  letters  and  doubt  that  the  first  Chris 
tian  teachers  included  men  quite  competent  to  commit  their 
message  to  writing,  and  that  the  communities  which  they 
founded  included  men  capable  of  appreciating  and  being 
grateful  for  such  a  service  ?  If  Matthew,  Mark,  and  Luke 
wrote  their  Gospels  at  the  time  tradition  says  they  did,  they 
!  only  met  a  demand  which  must  have  been  then  pressing,  and 


VIII.]     DIFFICULTY  OF  CHANGING  AN  ACCEPTED  GOSPEL.       125 

which,  if  they  had  not  then  satisfied  it,  somebody  else  must 
have  attempted  to  supply. 

Well,  if  we  find  reason  to  hold  that  Gospels  were  written 
by  Apostles  or  their  companions,  is  it  consistent  with  proba 
bility  to  believe  that  they  were  subsequently  changed  from 
their  original  form  ?  I  have  told  you  of  Kenan's  explanation 
of  the  original  of  the  Gospels  in  the  little  books  in  which 
different  simple  Christians  wrote  down  such  stories  as  they 
had  come  across  concerning  the  Saviour's  life  and  teaching. 
To  me  it  is  the  most  amazing  thing  in  the  world  that  a  man 
should  write  seven  volumes  about  the  Origins  of  Christianity, 
and  not  have  become  cognizant  of  the  existence  of  the  Chris 
tian  Church.  One  of  the  most  patent  facts  in  the  history  of 
our  religion  is  its  organization :  wherever  there  were  Chris 
tians  they  formed  a  community ;  wherever  a  Church  was 
founded  it  was  provided  with  duly  commissioned  teachers. 
It  was  not  the  business  of  the  individual  Christian  to  compile 
a  Gospel  for  himself;  he  was  duly  instructed  in  it  by  the 
recognized  heads  of  the  Christian  community  to  which  he 
belonged.  I  do  not  pretend  that  there  was  any  decision  of 
the  universal  Church  on  the  subject.  I  well  believe  that 
the  adoption  of  a  definite  form  of  evangelic  instruction  was 
regulated  for  each  Church  by  its  bishop,  if  you  will  permit  me 
to  call  him  so;  or  if  any  difficulty  is  raised  as  to  the  use  of 
this  word,  I  will  say,  by  its  presiding  authority.  But,  on  any 
view  of  this  authority,  its  extension  renders  it  incredible  that 
the  Gospels  originated  in  the  haphazard  way  which  Renan 
describes. 

When  the  choice  of  which  I  speak  was  once  made,  was 
it  liable  to  be  easily  changed  ?  I  have  spoken  already  of  the 
blunder  in  historical  inquiries  of  projecting  our  own  feelings 
into  the  minds  of  men  of  former  generations.  This  is  what 
we  are  accused  of  doing  here.  We  have  been  brought  up 
from  childhood  to  believe  in  the  inspiration  of  these  sacred 
narratives ;  wilfully  to  change  a  word  of  them  seems  to  us 
sacrilege.  But,  it  is  said,  we  have  no  right  to  attribute  any 
such  feeling  to  the  first  disciples,  whose  sole  anxiety  was  to 
know  as  much  as  possible  of  what  Jesus  had  said  or  done, 
and  to  whom  it  would  be  a  matter  of  comparative  indifference 


126  THE    SYNOPTIC    GOSPELS.  [VIII. 

whether  or  not  they  had  the  exact  form  in  which  Mark  or 
Luke  had  recorded  it.  But  people  would  at  least  be  solici 
tous  about  the  historic  certainty  of  the  things  to  which  they 
were  to  give  their  faith.  St.  Luke  tells  his  disciple  his  object 
in  writing  was  Iva  eTTtyvws  Trepl  wi/  Karrj^Orj^  Aoyoov  rrjv  cur<£a- 
Aetav.  Without  such  acr<£aA.eia  the  Christian  people  could  not 
be  satisfied.  Theophilus  of  Antioch,  writing  about  A.D.  180, 
says :  '  Writers  ought  either  to  have  been  eyewitnesses  them 
selves  of  the  things  they  assert,  or  at  least  have  accurately 
learned  them  from  those  who  had  seen  them.  For  those  who 
write  uncertain  things  do  nothing  but  beat  the  air.'  The 
feeling  here  expressed  is  so  natural  that  I  cannot  believe  that 
those  who  were  in  possession  of  narratives,  supposed  to  have 
been  written  by  men  of  such  rank  in  the  Church  as  Matthew, 
Mark,  and  Luke,  could  allow  them  to  be  altered  by  inferior 
authority.  Little  do  those  who  suppose  such  an  alteration 
possible  know  of  the  conservatism  of  Christian  hearers.  St. 
Augustine,  in  a  well-known  story,  tells  us  that,  when  a 
bishop,  reading  the  chapter  about  Jonah's  gourd,  ventured 
to  substitute  St.  Jerome's  'hedera'  for  the  established  'cucur- 
bita,'  such  a  tumult  was  raised,  that  if  the  bishop  had  perse 
vered  he  would  have  been  left  without  a  congregation.*  The 
feeling  that  resents  such  change  is  due  to  no  later  growth  of 
Christian  opinion.  Try  the  experiment  on  any  child  of  your 
acquaintance.  Tell  him  a  story  that  interests  him;  and  when 
you  next  meet  him  tell  him  the  story  again,  making  variations 
in  your  recital,  and  see  whether  he  will  not  detect  the 
change,  and  be  indignant  at  it.  I  do  not  believe,  in  short, 
that  any  Church  would  permit  a  change  to  be  made  in  the 
form  of  evangelic  instruction  in  which  its  members  had  been 
catechetically  trained  unless  those  who  made  the  change 
were  men  of  authority  equal  to  their  first  instructors.  Take 
the  age  in  which  the  Apostles  and  apostolic  men  were  going 
about  as  teachers ;  and  with  regard  to  that  age  I  can  believe 
in  recastings  and  divers  versions  of  the  evangelic  narrative, 
all  commended  to  the  Christian  world  by  equal  authority. 
But  if  a  bishop  of  the  age  of  Papias  had  presumed  to  inno- 

*  Augustine,  Ep.  71,  vol.  ii.,  pp.  161,  179. 


IX.]  THEORIES   AS  TO    THEIR    ORIGIN.  12 J 

vate  on  the  Gospel  as  it  had  been  delivered  by  those  '  which 
from  the  beginning  were  eyewitnesses  and  ministers  of 
the  Word,'  I  venture  to  say  that,  like  the  bishop  of  whom 
Augustine  tells,  he  would  have  been  left  without  a  congre 
gation. 


IX. 

PART    II. 

THEORIES   AS   TO   THEIR   ORIGIN. 

HAVING  at  some  length  laid  before  you  the  account  which 
Church  tradition  gives  of  the  origin  of  our  Gospels,  I  went 
on  in  the  last  lecture  to  compare  with  this  the  conclusions 
to  which  we  are  led  by  a  study  of  these  writings  themselves; 
and  I  did  not  then  proceed  further  than  was  necessary  to 
show  that  these  conclusions  are  in  no  wise  contradictory  to 
the  traditional  account,  but  rather  are  confirmatory  of  it. 
But  the  study  of  the  genesis  of  the  Gospels  has  much  more 
than  an  apologetic  interest.  Critics  of  all  schools  have  been 
tempted  to  grapple  with  the  perplexing  problems  presented 
by  the  aspect  of  three  narratives  of  the  same  series  of  events, 
so  like  each  other,  not  only  in  arrangement,  but  in  verbal 
details,  as  to  convince  us  that  there  must  be  a  close  affinity 
of  some  kind  between  them,  and  yet  presenting  manifold 
diversities,  such  as  to  be  irreconcilable  with  the  most  obvious 
ways  of  accounting  for  the  resemblances. 

It  is  not  without  some  reluctance  that  I  go  on  to  describe 
to  you  more  minutely  the  problems  that  have  to  be  solved, 
and  to  tell  you  something  of  the  attempts  made  to  solve 
them.  Not  that  I  share  the  feelings  of  some  who  regard  their 
belief  in  the  inspiration  of  the  Gospels  as  precluding  any  such 
inquiry.  They  cannot  imagine  that  one  inspired  by  the  Holy 
Spirit  should  have  need  to  consult  any  previous  document, 
and  they  think  it  enough  to  hold  that  such  as  the  Gospels  are 
now,  such  their  Divine  Author  from  the  first  ordained  they 
should  be.  Some  such  feeling  stood  for  a  time  in  the  way  of 


128  THE    SYNOPTIC    GOSPELS.  [iX. 

geological  inquiries.  If  the  markings  of  a  stone  resembled  a 
plant  or  a  fish,  it  was  held  that  this  was  but  a  sport  of  Creative 
Power,  which  had  from  the  beginning  made  the  fossil  such  as 
we  see  it.  Yet  we  now  feel  that  we  may  lawfully  study  the 
indications  of  their  origin  which  God's  works  present,  in  the 
reverent  belief  that  He  has  not  mocked  us  with  delusive  sug 
gestions  of  a  fictitious  history.  Similarly  we  may  pronounce 
it  to  be  not  truly  reverent  to  decline  a  careful  study  of  God's 
Word  on  account  of  any  preconceived  theory  as  to  the  mode 
of  composition  most  befitting  an  inspired  writer. 

My  reluctance  to  enter  with  you  upon  this  inquiry  arises 
solely  from  my  sense  of  its  extreme  difficulty.  As  I  have 
already  said,  we  are  on  ground  where  we  have  no  authentic 
history  to  guide  us;  for  the  earliest  uninspired  Church  writers 
are  far  too  late  to  have  had  personal  knowledge  of  the  pub 
lication  of  the  Gospels,  and  such  traditions  as  they  have 
preserved  are  extremely  scanty,  and  not  always  to  be  im 
plicitly  relied  on.  And  the  history  of  the  present  speculations 
shows  how  difficult  it  is  to  plant  firm  footsteps  where  we  are 
obliged  to  depend  on  mere  criticism,  unaided  by  historical 
testimony.  For  if  I  wished  to  deter  you  from  forming  any 
theory  as  the  origin  of  the  Gospels,  and  to  persuade  you  that 
knowledge  on  this  subject  is  now  unattainable  by  man,  I 
should  only  have  to  make  a  list  for  you  of  the  discordant 
results  arrived  at  by  a  number  of  able  and  ingenious  men 
who  have  given  much  study  to  the  subject. 

Yet  patient  and  careful  thought  has  so  often  gained  un 
expected  victories,  that  we  incur  the  reproach  of  indolent 
cowardice  if  we  too  easily  abandon  problems  as  insoluble. 
In  particular,  we  ought  not  to  grudge  our  labour  when  it  is 
on  God's  Word  we  are  asked  to  bestow  our  study.  It  is 
scarcely  creditable  to  Christians  that  in  recent  years  far  more 
pains  have  been  expended  on  the  minute  study  of  the  New 
Testament  writings  by  those  who  recognized  in  them  no 
Divine  element,  than  by  those  who  believe  in  their  inspira 
tion.  In  fact,  their  very  belief  in  inspiration,  fixing  the 
thoughts  of  Christians  on  the  Divine  Author  of  the  Bible, 
made  them  indifferent  or  even  averse  to  a  comparative  ex 
amination  of  the  work  of  the  respective  human  authors  of  the 


IX.]      WAYS    OF   ACCOUNTING   FOR    THEIR   AGREEMENTS.      129 

sacred  books.  They  were  sure  there  could  be  no  contradiction 
between  them,  and  it  was  all  one  to  their  faith  in  what  part  of 
the  Bible  a  statement  was  made,  so  that  no  practical  object 
seemed  to  be  gained  by  inquiring  whether  or  not  what  was 
said  by  Matthew  was  said  also  by  Mark.  In  modern  times  the 
study  of  the  New  Testament  has  been  taken  up  by  critics  who, 
far  from  shutting  their  eyes  to  discrepancies,  are  eager  to 
magnify  into  a  contradiction  the  smallest  indication  they  can 
discover  of  opposite  'tendencies'  in  the  different  books;  and 
we  must  at  least  acknowledge  the  closeness  and  carefulness 
of  their  reading,  and  be  willing  in  that  respect  to  profit  by 
their  example.  For  these  reasons,  notwithstanding  the  dis 
couraging  absence  of  agreement  among  the  critics  who  have 
tried  from  a  study  of  the  Gospels  themselves  to  deduce  the 
history  of  their  origin,  I  think  myself  bound  to  lay  before  you 
some  account  of  their  speculations. 

The  hypotheses  which  have  been  used  to  account  for  the 
close  agreement  of  the  Synoptic  Evangelists  in  so  much  com 
mon  matter  are  three-fold  : — (i)  The  Evangelists  copied,  one 
from  another ;  the  work  of  him  whom  we  may  place  first  having 
been  known  to  the  second,  and  these  two  to  the  third.  (2)  The 
Evangelists  made  use  of  one  or  more  written  documents 
which  have  now  perished.  (3)  The  common  source  was  not 
written  but  oral,  the  very  words  in  which  Apostles  had  first 
told  the  story  of  the  Saviour's  works  having  been  faithfully 
preserved  by  the  memory  of  different  disciples.  There  is  wide 
room  for  differences  among  themselves  in  details  between  the| 
advocates  of  each  of  these  three  solutions ;  and  the  solutions 
also  may  be  variously  combined,  for  they  do  not  exclude  one 
another.  If  the  first  of  the  three  Synoptics,  whichever  he 
was,  made  use  of  a  previous  document,  it  is  conceivable  that 
the  second  Evangelist  may  have  not  only  made  use  of  the 
first  Gospel,  but  also  of  that  previous  document ;  while,  again, 
if  we  assert  that  an  Evangelist  used  written  documents,  we 
are  still  not  in  a  position  to  deny  that  some  of  the  things  he 
records  had  been  communicated  to  him  orally.  Evidently, 
therefore,  there  is  room  for  a  great  variety  of  rival  hypotheses. 

Before  I  enter  on  any  detailed  discussion  of  them  there  is 
a  preliminary  caution  which  it  is  by  no  means  unnecessary 

K 


130  THE    SYNOPTIC    GOSPELS.  [iX. 

to  give,  viz.  that  in  our  choice  of  a  solution  we  ought  to  be 
determined  solely  by  a  patient  comparison  of  each  hypothesis 
with  the  facts ;  and  that  we  are  not  entitled  to  decide  off-hand 
on  any  solution  according  to  the  measure  of  its  agreement 
with  our  preconceived  theory  of  inspiration.  For  example, 
there  are  some  who  think  that  they  are  entitled  to  reject  with 
out  examination  both  the  first  and  the  second  of  the  solutions 
I  have  stated,  because  they  cannot  believe  that  if  the  story  of 
our  Lord's  life  had  been  once  written  down  by  an  inspired 
hand,  any  subsequent  writer  who  knew  of  it  would  permit 
himself  to  vary  from  it  in  the  slightest  degree  ;  while  they  do 
not  find  the  same  difficulty  in  conceiving  that  variations  may 
have  been  introduced  into  the  narrative  in  the  process  of  oral 
transmission  before  it  was  written  down.*  For  myself,  I  see 
no  a  priori  reason  for  preferring  one  account  of  the  matter  to 
the  other.  If  we  had  had  to  speculate  beforehand  on  the  way 
in  which  it  was  likely  God  would  have  provided  an  inspired 
record  of  the  life  of  His  Son  upon  this  earth,  we  should  not 
have  guessed  that  there  would  be  four  different  narratives 
presenting  certain  variations  among  themselves.  But  we 
know,  as  a  matter  of  fact,  that  He  has  not  seen  fit  to  secure 
uniformity  of  statement  between  the  sacred  writers.  I  need 
not  delay  to  give  reasons  for  thinking  that  the  Bible,  such  as 
we  have  it,  is  better  adapted  for  the  work  it  was  to  accom 
plish  than  if  it  had  been  endowed  with  attributes  which  men 
might  think  would  add  to  its  perfection.  I  content  myself 
with  the  matter  of  fact  that  God  has  permitted  that  there 
should  be  variations  between  the  Gospels ;  and  if  He  did  not 
choose  to  prevent  them  by  miraculously  guarding  the  memory 
of  those  who  reported  the  narratives  before  they  were  written 
down,  I  know  no  greater  reason  for  His  interfering  miracu- 

*  Thus  Mr.  Sadler,  a  writer  for  whom  I  have  much  respect,  says  (Comm. 
on  St.  Matthew,  p.  xi)  :  '  St.  Luke,  if  he  had  either  of  the  two  first 
[Gospels]  before  him,  would  have  scarcely  reproduced  so  much  that  is 
common  to  both,  with  alterations  also  which  he  could  never  have  made  if 
he  looked  upon  them  as  inspired  documents.'  And  again,  '  The  inspira 
tion  [of  the  Gospels]  is  incompatible  with  the  theory  that  they  were  all 
taken  from  one  document,  for  in  such  a  case  that  unknown  and  lost 
document  must  have  been  the  only  one  which  could  be  called  the  work 
of  the  Spirit;  and  the  alterations  which  each  one  made  in  it,  which  their 
mutual  discrepancies  show,  prove  that  in  altering  it  they  individually  were 
not  so  far  guided  by  the  Holy  Spirit.* 


IX.]  THEORIES   AS   TO    INSPIRATION    IRRELEVANT.  131 

lously .  for  a   similar  purpose   on   the   supposition  that  the 
Evangelists  used  written  documents. 

Needless  embarrassment,  in  fact,  has  been  caused  by 
theories  invented  under  a  fancied  necessity  of  establishing 
that  conditions  have  been  satisfied  in  the  transmission  of  the 
Divine  message,  which  cannot  be  shown  to  be  essential  to 
what  one  of  the  Evangelists  declares  to  have  been  his  object 
in  writing,  viz.  'That  ye  might  believe  that  Jesus  is  the 
Christ,  the  Son  of  God,  and  that  believing,  ye  might  have  life 
through  His  name.'  We  do  not  imagine  that  when  two  of 
the  apostolic  missionaries  went  about  preaching  the  Gospel 
they  would  think  themselves  bound  to  tell  the  story  of  the 
Saviour's  life  exactly  in  the  same  way,  nor  even  that  if  one 
were  relating  an  incident  at  which  he  had  not  been  present 
himself,  he  would  think  it  necessary  to  repeat  the  identical 
words  of  his  informant.  If  God  did  not  see  fit  to  provide 
statements  of  rigid  uniformity  for  the  establishment  of  the 
faith  of  the  first  generation  of  Christians,  whose  souls  were, 
no  doubt,  as  dear  to  Him  as  those  of  their  successors,  what 
warrant  have  we  for  asserting  that  He  must  have  dealt 
differently  with  later  generations  ?  When  anyone  imagines 
himself  entitled  to  pronounce  off-hand  that  the  second  Evan 
gelist  (whichever  he  was)  could  not  have  known  that  an  inspired 
writer  had  performed  the  task  before  him,  we  cannot  but  ask 
him  if  he  does  not  believe  that  the  second  Evangelist  was 
inspired  as  much  as  the  first.  Whether  the  human  author  of 
the  second  Gospel  knew  or  not  that  he  had  had  a  predecessor, 
the  Divine  Author  of  the  work  assuredly  knew;  and,  notwith 
standing,  it  was  His  will  that  the  second  Gospel  should  be 
written.  The  fact  that  the  two  Evangelists  stood  precisely 
on  a  level,  in  respect  of  supernatural  assistance,  makes  all 
the  difference  in  the  world  to  the  argument.  We  justly  assign 
to  the  four  Gospels  a  place  apart.  Though  many  in  our  day 
undertake  to  write  Lives  of  Christ,  we  know  that  what  they 
presume  to  add  without  warrant  from  these  inspired  narratives 
may  freely  be  rejected.  But  the  apostolic  preachers  were 
not  dependent  on  any  written  Gospel  for  their  knowledge. 
Every  one  of  our  Evangelists  has  told  us  many  things  which 
he  could  not  have  learned  from  the  work  of  any  of  the  other 

K  2 


I J2  THE    SYNOPTIC    GOSPELS.  [lX. 

three.     If  one  of  the   apostolic   band   of   missionaries,    on 
quitting  a  Church  which  he  had  founded,  desired  to  leave 
behind,  for  the  instruction  of  his  converts,  a  record  of  the 
facts  on  which  their  faith  rested,  I  know  no  reason  why  he 
should  not  be  free  to  choose  whether  he  should  give  to  be 
copied  the  story  as  written  by  another  Evangelist,  or  whether 
he  should  commit  to  writing  the  narrative  as  he  had  been 
accustomed,  in  his  oral  teaching,  to  deliver  it  himself.     I  am 
sure  that  we  are  over-arrogant  if  we  venture  to  dictate  the 
conditions  according  to  which  inspiration  must  act,  and  if 
we  undertake  to  pronounce,  from  our  own  sense  of  the  fitness 
of  things,  what  mode  of  using  his  materials  would  be  per 
missible  to  one  commissioned  to  write  by  God's  Holy  Spirit. 
But  Alford  objects,  that  if  one  of  our  Evangelists  knew 
the  work  of  another,  or  a  document  on  which  it  was  founded, 
the  arbitrary  manner  in  which  he  must  have  used  his  arche 
type — at  one  moment  servilely  copying  its  words,  and  the 
next  moment  capriciously  deviating  from  them — is  inconsis 
tent  not  only  with  a  belief  in  the  inspiration  of  the  antecedent 
document  employed,  but  also  with  the  ascription  to  it  of  any 
authority  whatever.     I  am  persuaded  that  this  assertion  can 
not  be  maintained  by  anyone  who  takes  the  pains  to  study 
the  way  in  which  historians  habitually  use  the  documents 
they   employ  as  authorities.     The   ordinary  rule   is,   that  a 
great  deal  of  the  language  (including  most  of  the  remarkable 
words)  of  the   original   passes   into  the   work   of  the   later 
writer,  who,  however,  is  apt  to  show  his  independence  by 
variations,  the  reasons  for  which  are  often  not  obvious.     Mr. 
Smith,  of  Jordan  Hill,  whose  work  on  the  Shipwreck  of  St. 
Paul   I    have   already   recommended   to   you,  wrote   also   a 
treatise  on  the  origin  of  the  Gospels.     In  this  he  places  side 
by  side  accounts  of  battles,  as  given  in  Napier's  History  of  the 
Peninsular  War,  in  Alison's  History,  and  in  a  French  military 
memoir  employed  by  both  writers;  and  he  finds  just  the  same 
phenomena  as  our  Gospels  exhibit.     The  three  narratives  not 
only  agree  in  their  general  purport,  but  have  many  common 
words:  sometimes  a  whole  sentence  is  common  to  two;  and 
yet  identity  of  narration  is  never  kept  up  long  without  some 
interruption. 


IX.]  VARIATIONS    IN    TRANSCRIPTION.  133 

In  ancient  times  it  was  considered  legitimate  to  use,  with 
out  acknowledgment,  the  very  words  of  a  preceding  writer 
to  a  much  greater  extent  than  would  now  be  regarded  as 
consistent  with  literary  honesty.  But  even  when  one  mea'ns 
to  copy  the  exact  words  of  another,  it  is  very  easy  to  deviate 
from  perfect  accuracy.  It  might  be  amusing,  but  would  lead- 
me  too  far  from  my  subject,  if  I  were  to  give  you  illustrations 
how  little  we  can  be  sure  that  what  modern  writers  print  with 
inverted  commas  does  really  contain  the  ipsissima  verba  of  the 
writer  whom  they  profess  to  quote.  Of  ancient  writers,  there* 
is  none  whose  reputation  for  accuracy  stands  higher  than 
that  of  Thucydides:  yet,  what  he  gives  (v.  47)  as  the  accurate 
copy  of  a  treaty  presents  no  fewer  than  thirty-one  variations 
from  the  portions  of  the  actual  text  recently  recovered.*  The 
frequent  occurrence  of  variations  in  what  are  intended  to  be 
faithful  transcripts  arises  from  the  fact  that  it  is  irksome  to 
stop  the  work  of  the  pen  in  order  to  refer  to  the  archetype, 
and  so  the  copyist  is  under  a  constant  temptation  to  try  to 
carry  more  in  his  head  than  his  memory  can  faithfully  retain. 
Naturally,  then,  when  a  writer  undertakes  no  obligation  of 
faithful  transcription,  but  of  his  own  free  will  uses  the  words 
of  another,  he  will  look  at  his  archetype  at  longer  intervals — 
not  referring  to  it  as  long  as  he  believes  that  he  sufficiently 
remembers  the  sense;  and  consequently,  while  he  reproduces 
the  more  remarkable  words  which  have  fixed  themselves  in 
his  memory,  will  be  apt  to  vary  in  what  may  seem  a  capri 
cious  way  from  his  original.  I  do  not  think  that  the  varia 
tions  between  the  Synoptic  Gospels  exceed  in  number  or 
amount  what  might  be  expected  to  occur  in  the  case  of 
three  writers  using  a  common  authority  ;  nor  do  I  think  that 
we  have  any  right  to  assume  that  God  would  miraculously 
interfere  to  prevent  the  occurrence  of  such  variations. 

If  we  desire  to  know  what  amount  of  variation  an  Evange 
list  might  probably  think  it  needless  to  exclude,  some  means 
of  judgment  are  afforded  by  the  three  accounts  of  the  conver 
sion  of  St.  Paul  contained  in  the  Acts  of  the  Apostles.  These 
accounts  present  the  same  phenomena  of  great  resemblance 

I  *  Mahaffy's  History  of  Greek  Literature,  ii.  121.  J 


134  THE    SYNOPTIC    GOSPELS.  [iX. 

\vith  unaccountable  diversities,  and  even  apparent  contradic 
tions.  If  they  had  been  found  in  different  works  it  might 
have  been  contended  that  the  author  of  one  had  not  seen 
the  others;  and  ingenious  critics  might  have  even  discovered 
the  different  'tendencies '  of  the  narrators.  As  things  are,  we 
seem  to  have  in  the  comparison  of  these  narratives  a  measure 
of  the  amount  of  variation  which  St.  Luke  regarded  as  com 
patible  with  substantial  accuracy.  I  am  therefore  unable  to 
assent  to  those  who  would  set  aside  without  examination  the 
hypothesis  that  one  Evangelist  was  indebted  to  another,  or  that 
both  had  used  a  common  document ;  and  who  would  reduce 
us  to  an  oral  tradition  as  the  only  source  of  their  agreements 
that  can  be  asserted  without  casting  an  imputation  on  the 
inspiration  or  on  the  authority  of  our  existing  documents. 

Yet,  after  all,  we  have  advanced  but  a  little  way  when  we 
have  vindicated  for  the  advocates  for  the  documentary  hypo 
thesis*  the  right  to  get  a  hearing.  We  may  now  go  on  to 
examine  what  need  there  is  of  any  such  hypothesis.  The 
oral  teaching  of  the  Apostles  was,  no  doubt,  the  common 
basis  of  all  the  Evangelic  narratives.  Does  this  common 
basis  sufficiently  account  for  all  the  facts? 

Let  us  then  observe  the  precise  nature  of  the  agreement 
between  the  Synoptic  narratives.  If  the  story  of  a  miracle 
were  told  by  two  independent  witnesses  we  should  have 
delations  in  substantial  agreement  no  doubt,  but  likely  to 
differ  considerably  in  their  form.  But  in  a  number  of  cases 
;the  Synoptic  narratives  agree  so  closely,  in  form  as  well  as 
in  substance,  as  to  convince  us  that  they  are  not  stories  told 
iby  independent  witnesses,  but  different  versions  of  the  story 
some  one  witness  had  told.  Take,  for  example,  a  verse 
common  to  all  three  Synoptics  (Matt.  ix.  6;  Mark  ii.  10; 
Luke  v.  24) :  '  But  that  ye  may  know  that  the  Son  of  Man 
(hath  power  on  earth  to  forgive  sins  (then  saith  he  to  the  sick 
lof  the  palsy),  Arise,  take  up  thy  bed,  and  go  unto  thine  house.' 


*  '  Hypothesis,'  perhaps,  is  hardly  a  right  word  to  use.  We  know  as  a 
certain  fact,  from  St.  Luke's  preface,  that  other  documents  were  in  exist 
ence  when  he  wrote.  It  is  then  scarcely  an  hypothesis  to  assume  that  he 
made  use  of  these  documents,  however  much  his  superior  knowledge 
enabled  him  to  supplement  or  correct  them. 


IX.]  THE    TRA7    riON    HAD    BECOME    FIXED.  135 

You  will  feel  that  i(  would  be  scarcely  possible  for  three  in 


dependent  narrators  to  agree  in  interpolating  this  parenthesi 
into  their  report  of  our  Lord's  words.  Take  another  example : 
St.  Luke  (viii.  28),  relating  the  miracle  of  the  healing  of  the: 
demoniac,  tells  that  'when  he  saw  Jesus  he  cried  out,  'What 
have  I  to  do  with  thee,  Jesus,  thou  Son  of  God  most  high  ? 
I  beseech  thee,  torment  me  not.  For  he  had  commanded 
the  unclean  spirit  to  come  out  of  the  man.'  Now,  if  the 
story  had  been  told  in  the  chronological  order  we  should 
first  have  Jesus'  command  to  the  unclean  spirit  to  depart, 
and  then  the  remonstrance  of  the  demoniac.  So  when  we 
find  Mark  (v.  7)  agreeing  with  Luke  in  the  minute  detail  of 
relating  the  remonstrance  first,  and  then  adding  parentheti 
cally  that  there  had  been  a  command,  this  coincidence  alone 
gives  us  warrant  for  thinking  that  we  have  here,  not  the  story 
as  it  might  have  been  told  by  two  different  witnesses  to  the. 
miracle,  but  the  story  in  the  form  in  which  a  single  witness) 
was  accustomed  to  tell  it. 

Add  now  the  consideration  that  both  in  the  instances  just 
produced,  and  in  many  others,  we  have  a  vast  number  of 
verbal  coincidences  between  the  corresponding  narratives  of 
different  Evangelists  ;  and  we  may  go  further.  Either  the 
story,  as  it  proceeded  from  the  lips  of  that  single  witness, 
was  written  down  ;  or  at  least  the  hearers  did  not  content 
themselves  with  a  faithful  report  of  the  substance  of  what  he 
related,  but  must  have  striven  to  commit  to  memory  the  very 
words  in  which  he  related  it.  Before  the  narrative  came  into 
our  Gospels  it  had  passed  out  of  the  fluidity  of  a  story,  told 
now  one  way,  now  another,  and  had  crystallized  into  a 
definite  form. 

When  we  have  reached  this  point,  it  seems  to  become 
practically  unimportant  to  determine  whether  or  not  writing 
had  been  used  for  the  preservation  of  the  story  before  it  was 
included  in  our  Gospels.  If  writing  was  so  used,  it  would 
clearly  be  idle  to  inquire  whether  the  material  to  which  the 
writing  had  been  committed  was  papyrus,  or  parchment,  or 
waxen  tablets.  Well,  if  we  are  willing  to  believe  that  the 
memory  of  the  first  disciples,  unspoiled  by  the  habit  of  writ 
ing  and  stimulated  by  the  surpassing  interest  of  the  subject, 


136  THE   SYNOPTIC    GOSPELS  [iX. 

retained  what  was  entrusted  to  it  as  tenaciously  and  as  faith 
fully  as  a  written  record,  then  the  hypothesis  that  a  story 
had  been  preserved  by  memory  stands  on  the  same  level 
as  the  hypothesis  that  it  had  been  preserved  on  papyrus  or 
on  parchment.  We  should  have  no  means  of  determining, 
and  very  little  interest  in  determining,  which  hypothesis 
was  actually  true.  In  either  case  we  acknowledge  that  the 
tradition  had  assumed  the  fixity  of  a  written  record. 

It  is  because  we  have  not  only  one  but  a  series  of  stories 
common  to  the  Synoptics  that  the  difference  between  docu 
mentary  and  oral  transmission  comes  to  have  a  practical 
meaning.  The  latter  supposition  contemplates  a  number  of 
stories  preserved  independently :  the  former  regards  them  as 
already  embodied  in  a  document  which,  even  if  it  did  not 
pretend  to  be  a  complete  Gospel,  contained  the  narration  of 
more  incidents  than  one,  disposed  in  a  definite  order.  Our 
choice  between  the  two  suppositions  can  be  guided  by  exa 
mining  whether  the  Evangelists  agree,  not  only  in  their  way 
of  relating  separate  stories,  but  also  in  the  order  in  which 
they  arrange  them.  Now,  a  careful  examination  brings  out 
the  fact  that  the  likeness  between  the  Synoptic  Gospels  is 
not  confined  to  agreement  in  the  way  of  telling  separate 
stories,  but  extends  also  to  the  order  of  arranging  them. 

JTake,  for  instance,  the  agreement  between  Matthew  and 
Mark  as  to  the  place  in  which  they  tell  the  death  of  John 

•the  Baptist  (Matt.  xiv.  i  ;  Mark  vi.    14).     They  relate  that 

\  when  Herod  heard  of  the  fame  of  Jesus  he  was  perplexed 
who  He  might  be,  and  said  to  his  servants,  '  This  is  John 
whom  I  beheaded.'  And  then,  in  order  to  explain  this 

'  speech,  the  two  Evangelists  go  back  in  their  narrative  to 
relate  the  beheading  of  John.  Their  agreement  in  this 
deviation  from  the  natural  chronological  order  can  scarcely 
be  explained  except  by  supposing  either  that  one  Evange 
list  copied  from  the  other,  or  both  from  a  common  source. 
The  order  of  St.  Luke  deviates  here  from  that  of  the  other 

»  two  Evangelists.     He  relates  the  imprisonment  of  John  in 

its  proper  place  (iii.  19),  and  the  perplexed  inquiry  of  Herod 

|  later  (ix.  7);  but  we  are  not  entitled  to  infer  that  he  did  not 

employ  the  same  source,  for  the  change  is  an  obvious  im- 


JX.]  AGREE   IN   ORDER   OF   NARRATIVE.  137 

provement  that  would  suggest  itself  to  anyone  desirous  to 
relate  the  history  in  chronological  order.  And  we  may  even 
conjecture  that  it  was  in  consequence  of  Luke's  thus  depart 
ing  from  the  order  of  his  archetype  that  he  has  come  to 
omit  altogether  the  direct  narrative  of  the  beheading  of 
John. 

The  example  I  have  cited  is  not  an  isolated  one.  Our 
attention,  indeed,  is  caught  by  a  few  cases  in  which  an  in 
cident  is  differently  placed  by  different  Evangelists,  but  the 
rule  is  uniformity  of  order ;  and  in  particular  Mark  and  Luke 
are  in  very  close  agreement.  Of  course  as  to  a  few  leading 
events,  the  arrangement  would  admit  of  no  choice.  All 
narratives  would  begin  with  the  story  of  our  Lord's  Birth, 
would  go  on  to  tell  of  His  Baptism,  and  would  finish  with 
His  Passion  and  Resurrection.  But  there  is  a  host  of  in 
cidents,  the  order  of  arranging  which  is  dictated  by  no 
internal  necessity.  If  these  had  been  preserved  separately 
by  oral  tradition,  the  chances  are  enormous  that  different 
persons  weaving  them  into  a  connected  narrative  would 
arrange  them  differently ;  for  the  stories  themselves  but 
rarely  contain  notes  of  time,  such  as  would  direct  the 
order  of  placing  them.  I  feel  bound,  therefore,  to  con 
clude  that  the  likeness  between  the  Gospels  is  not  suffi 
ciently  explained  by  their  common  basis,  the  oral  narrative 
of  the  Apostles  ;  and  that  they  must  have  copied,  either  one 
from  the  other — the  later  from  the  earlier — or  else  all  from 
some  other  document  earlier  than  any.  Reuss  *  has  divided 
the  Evangelic  narrative  into  124  sections,  of  which  47  are 
common  to  all  three  Synoptics ;  and  I  believe  that  in  thesei 
common  sections  we  have,  represented  approximately,  ajj 
primary  document  used  by  all  three  Evangelists.  I  say 
approximately,  for  of  course  we  cannot  assume  without 
careful  examination  that  some  of  these  sections  may  not 
have  come  in  from  a  different  source,  or  that  some  sections 


*  Professor  at  Strassburg.  The  division  is  given,  p.  17  of  the  introduc 
tion  to  his  Histoire  Evaugeligue,  which  forms  part  of  his  French  transla 
tion  of  the  Bible,  with  commentary.  I  have  found  this  introduction  very 
instructive,  and  it  would  have  been  more  so  if  Reuss  had  cleared  his  mind 
of  the  cobwebs  that  have  been  spun  about  the  fragments  of  Papias. 


138  THE    SYNOPTIC    GOSPELS.  [iX. 

which  we  now  find  only  in  two  Evangelists,  or  even  only  in 
one,  may  not  have  belonged  to  the  common  basis. 

On  the  other  hand,  a  study  of  the  order  of  narration  gives 
the  death-blow  to  Schleiermacher's  theory  that  the  'Logia' 
of  St.  Matthew  consisted  of  a  collection  of  our  Lord's  dis 
courses.     It  is  not  only  that  the  words  of  Papias,  as  I  have 
contended,  give  us  no  authority  for  believing  in  the  exis 
tence    of  this    *  Spruchsammlung,'    which    so    many   critics 
assume  as  undoubted  fact ;    but  critical  comparison  of  the 
Gospels  gives  us  reason  to  assert  the  negative,  and  say  that 
no  such  collection  of  discourses  existed.     If  the  Evangelists 
took  their  report  of  our  Lord's  sayings  from  a  previously 
existing   document,  they  would   have   been   likely  in   their 
arrangement  to   follow  the  order  of  that  document ;  but  if 
the  sayings  were  separately  preserved  by  the  memory  of  the 
hearers,  two  independent  arrangers  would  probably  dispose 
them  in  different  order.     Now,  the  sections  common  to  the 
three  Synoptics  contain  some  discourses  of  our  Lord,  and,  as 
a  rule,  these  follow  the  same  order  in  all ;  but  besides  these 
Matthew  and  Luke  report  many  other  of  His  sayings,  and 
in  the  case  of  these  last  there  is  no  agreement  between  the 
,  order  of  the  two  Evangelists.     Take,  for  example,  the  Ser 
mon  on  the  Mount,  which  seems  to  offer  the  best  chance  of 
complete  agreement,  there  being  a  corresponding  discourse 
in  St.  Luke.     But  the  result  is,  that  of  the  107  verses  in  the 
Sermon  on  the  Mount  only  27  appear  in  the  corresponding 
discourse  in  Luke  vi.    Twelve  more  of  these  verses  are  found 
in  the  nth  chapter,  14  in  the  izth,  3  in  the  i3th,  i  in  the 
1 4th,  3   in  the    i6th,  and  47  are  omitted  altogether.      The 
same  dislocation  is  found  if  we  compare  any  other  of  the 
discourses  in  St.  Matthew  with  St.  Luke.    And  if  we  further 
take  into  account  how  many  parables  and  other  sayings  of 
our  Lord  there  are  in  each  of  these  two  Gospels,  which  are 
not  found  in  the  other,  and  yet  which  no  one  who  found 
them  in  a  document  he  was  using  would  be  likely  to  omit, 
we  can  assert,  with  as  much  confidence  as  we  can  assert 
anything  on  critical  grounds  alone,  and  in  the  absence  of 
external   evidence,   that   Matthew   and   Luke  did  not  draw 
from    any  documentary  record    containing   only  our  Lord's. 


IX.]  MATTHEW   AND    LUKE    INDEPENDENT.  139 

discourses,  but  that  the  sayings  they  have  in  common  must 
have  reached  them  as  independent  fragments  of  an  oral 
tradition. 

What   I   have   said    gives   me   occasion   to   remark    that 
theories  as  to  one  of  the  Synoptics  having  copied  another 
seem  to  me  deserving  consideration,  only  if  we  confine  them 
to  the  relations  of  Mark  to  the  other  two,  for  Matthew  and 
Luke  show  every  sign  of  being  quite  independent  of  each 
other.*     When  we  compare  the  accounts  which  they  give 
of  our  Lord's  birth,  we  find  them  proceed  on  such  different 
lines  as  to  suggest  that  they  have  been  supplied  by  inde 
pendent  authorities.     The  two  accounts  agree  in  the  main 
facts  that  our  Lord  was  miraculously  conceived  of  the  Virgin 
Mary,  who  was  espoused  to  a  man  named  Joseph,  of  the 
lineage  of  David;   that  the  birth  took  place  at  Bethlehem,  < 
and  that  the  family  afterwards  resided  at  Nazareth.     But  the 
two  Gospels  give  different  genealogies  to  connect  Joseph 
with  David,  and  with  respect  to  further  details  those  which 
the  one  gives  are  absent  from  the  other.     In  the  one  we 
have  successive  revelations  to  Joseph,  the  visit  of  the  Magi,] 
the  slaughter  of  the  Innocents,  the  flight  into  Egypt.    In  thej 
other  the  annunciation  to  Mary,  the  visit  to  Elisabeth,  thej 
taxing,  the  visit  of  the  shepherds,  the  presentation  in  thej 
temple,  and  the  testimony  of  Simeon   and  Anna.     As  we| 
proceed  further  in  our  comparison  of  the  two  Gospels,  we 
continue  to  find  a  number  of  things  in  each  which  are  not' 
recorded  in  the  other ;  and  it  is  not  easy  to  see  why,  if  one 
were  using  the  other  as  an  authority,  he  should   omit  soJ 
many  things  well  suited  to  his  purpose.     When,  therefore, 
we  have  to  explain  the  agreements  of  these  two  Evangelists, 
the  hypothesis  that  one  borrowed  directly  from  the  other  is 
so  immensely  less  probable  than  the  hypothesis  that  both 
writers  drew  from  a  common  source,  that  the  former  hypo 
thesis  may  safely  be  left  out  of  consideration. 

The  hypothesis  that  the  later  of  the  Synoptics  borrowed 
from  the  earlier  may  evidently  be  maintained,  and  has  actu- 

*  If  this  be  so,  no  great  interval  of  time  can  have  separated  their  publi 
cations  ;  otherwise  the  later  could  scarcely  fail  to  have  become  acquainted 
with  the  work  of  the  earlier. 


140  THE    SYNOPTIC    GOSPELS.  [iX. 

[ally  been  maintained  in  six  different  forms,  according  as 
they  are  supposed  to  have  written  in  the  orders  :  Matthew, 
Mark,  Luke ;  Matthew,  Luke,  Mark  ;  Mark,  Matthew,  Luke  ; 
Mark,  Luke,  Matthew  ;  Luke,  Matthew,  Mark ;  Luke,  Mark, 
Matthew.  You  will  find  in  Meyer's  Commentary  (or,  perhaps, 
more  conveniently  in  that  of  Alford,  who  has  copied  Meyer's 
list)  the  names  of  the  advocates  of  each  of  these  arrange 
ments.  However,  if  we  regard  it  as  established  that  Matthew 
jand  Luke  were  independent,  it  is  only  with  regard  to  the 
relations  of  these  two  to  Mark  that  the  hypothesis  that  one 
Evangelist  used  the  work  of  another  need  come  under 
jconsideration.  Some  maintain  that  Mark's  Gospel  was  the 
earliest,  and  that  Matthew  and  Luke  independently  incor 
porated  portions  of  his  narrative  with  additions  of  their  own  : 
Bothers  believe  that  Mark  wrote  latest,  and  that  he  combined 
and  abridged  the  two  earlier  narratives.*  To  this  question  I 
'mean  to  return. 

The  theory  that  one  Evangelist  copied  the  work  of  another 
is  sometimes  modified  by  the  supposition  that  the  Gospel 
copied  was  not  one  of  those  we  read  now,  but  the  supposed 
original  Matthew  or  original  Mark,  from  which  it  is  imagined 
that  our  existing  Gospels  were  developed.  I  count  this  as 
but  a  form  of  the  solution  which  will  next  come  under  con 
sideration,  viz.  that  the  Evangelists  used  common  documents. 
To  give  to  one  of  these  documents  the  question-begging  name 
of  'original  Matthew,'  &c.,  is  to  overload  the  hypothesis  with 
an  assumption  which  it  is  impossible  to  verify.  Such  a  name 
implies  not  only  that  the  compiler  of  that  which  we  now  call 
St.  Matthew's  Gospel  used  previous  documents,  but  that  he 

*  This  controversy  illustrates  a  source  of  difficulty  in  these  critical 
inquiries,  viz. :  that  there  is  scarcely  anything  which  may  not  be  taken  up 
by  one  or  other  of  two  handles,  it  constantly  happening  that  the  same  facts 
are  appealed  to  by  critics  who  draw  from  them  quite  opposite  conclusions. 
For  example,  certain  miracles  recorded  by  St.  Mark  (i.  32)  are  related  to 
have  been  performed  '  at  even  when  the  sun  did  set '  (tyias  y€vofj.evr]S  8re 
eSvffev  6  ^Aioy).  Here  St.  Matthew  (viii.  16)  has  'at  even'  (oij-ios  yevo- 
^.4vn]s) ',  St.  Luke  (iv.  40),  '  when  the  sun  was  setting'  (Svvovros  TOV  f)\iov). 
One  critic  argues  that  this  comparison  clearly  shows  Mark  to  be  the  earliest, 
his  two  successors  having  each  omitted  part  of  his  fuller  statement.  Another 
critic  pronounces  this  to  be  a  clear  case  of  'conflation,'  the  latest  writer  evi 
dently  being  Mark,  who  carefully  combined  in  his  narrative  everything  that 
he  found  in  the  earlier  sources. 


IX. J  HYPOTHESIS    OF    HEBREW    ORIGINAL.  141 

used  some  one  document  in  a  pre-eminent  degree,  taking  it 
as  the  basis  of  his  work;  and  further,  that  the  name  of  the 
compiler  of  the  present  document  was  not  Matthew,  and  that 
this  was  the  name  of  the  author  of  the  basis-document.  It 
is  unscientific  so  to  encumber  with  details  the  solution  of  a 
problem  which,  in  its  simplest  form,  presents  quite  enough  of 
difficulty.  Accumulation  of  unverifiable  details  is  a  manifest 
note  of  spuriousness.  We  should,  for  instance,  be  thankful 
to  anyone  who  could  tell  us  in  what  year  Papias  or  Justin 
Martyr  was  born  ;  but  if  our  informant  went  on  to  tell  us  the 
day  of  the  month  and  hour  of  the  day,  we  should  know  at 
once  that  we  had  to  do  with  romance,  not  with  history.  Quite 
in  like  manner  we  feel  safe  in  rejecting  such  a  history  as 
Scholten  has  given  of  the  origin  of  St.  Mark's  Gospel.  He 
tells  how,  from  the  proto-Marcus  combined  with  the  collection 
of  speeches  contained  in  the  proto-Matthaeus,  there  resulted 
the  deutero-Matthaeus ;  how  this  was  in  time  improved  into  a 
trito-Matthaeus,  and,  finally,  this  employed  by  a  new  editor  of 
the  proto-Marcus  to  manufacture  by  its  means  the  deutero- 
Marcus  which  we  have  now.  A  story  so  circumstantial  and 
so  baseless  has  no  interest  for  the  historical  inquirer. 

The  advocates  of  the  documentary  hypothesis  have  also 
been  apt  to  encumber  their  theories  with  details  which  pass 
out  of  the  province  of  history  into  that  of  romance,  as  they 
undertake  to  number  and  name  the  different  documents 
which  have  been  used  in  the  composition  of  the  Gospels. 
Anyone  who  assumes  that  our  Evangelists  used  a  common 
document  has  first  to  settle  the  question,  In  what  language 
are  we  to  suppose  that  document  to  have  been  written  :  Greek 
or  Hebrew  ?  where,  of  course,  the  latter  word  means  not  the 
classical  Hebrew  of  the  Old  Testament,  but  the  modern  type 
of  the  language,  Aramaic,  to  which  the  name  Hebrew  is  given 
in  the  New  Testament,  and  which  we  know  was  extensively 
used  in  Palestine  in  our  Lord's  time.  It  was  employed  for 
literary  purposes :  Josephus,  for  instance,  tells  us  in  his  pre 
face  that  his  work  on  the  Jewish  wars  had  been  originally 
written  in  that  language.  It  is  intrinsically  probable  that  the 
Hebrew-speaking  Christians  of  Palestine  should  have  a  Gos 
pel  in  their  own  language,  and  |we  actually  hear  of  Hebrew 


142  THE    SYNOPTIC    GOSPELS.  [iX. 

Gospels  claiming  great  antiquity.  It  is  therefore  no  great 
stretch  of  assumption  to  suppose  that  a  Hebrew  Gospel  was 
jthe  first  to  be  written,  and  that  this  was  made  use  of  by  the 
'writers  of  Greek  Gospels. 

The  hypothesis  of  a  Hebrew  original  at  once  accounts  for 
a  number  of  verbal  differences  between  corresponding  pas 
sages  in  different  Gospels.  How  easy  it  is  for  the  process  of 
translation  to  introduce  variations  not  to  be  found  in  the 
original  may  be  abundantly  illustrated  from  the  Authorized 
Version,*  the  translators  of  which  declare  in  their  preface  that 
they  deliberately  adopted  the  principle  of  not  thinking  them 
selves  bound  always  to  translate  the  same  Greek  word  by  the 
same  English.  For  example,  there  is  considerable  verbal 
difference  between  the  two  following  texts  :  '  John  had  his 
raiment  of  camel's  hair,  and  a  leathern  girdle  about  his  loins, 
and  his  meat  was  locusts  and  wild  honey'  (Matt.  iii.  4);  'John 
was  clothed  with  camel's  hair,  and  with  a  girdle  of  a  skin 
about  his  loins,  and  he  did  eat  locusts  and  wild  honey'  (Mark 
i.  6).  Yet  the  sense  is  so  precisely  the  same  that  the  varia 
tions  would  be  completely  accounted  for,  if  we  suppose  the 
two  to  be  independent  translations  of  the  same  original  in 
another  language.  We  know  for  certain  that  the  most 
important  difference  between  the  two  texts  can  be  thus 
accounted  for  ;  the  '  girdle  of  a  skin '  in  one  Evangelist  and 
the  '  leathern  girdle '  of  the  other  being  both  translations  of 
the  same  Greek  words,  t^v-^v  Se/o/xanV??!/.  It  is,  then,  a  very 
tempting  conjecture  that  the  further  differences,  'had  his  rai 
ment  of  camel's  hair,'  '  was  clothed  with  camel's  hair; '  '  his 
meat  was  locusts  and  wild  honey,'  '  he  did  eat  locusts  and 
wild  honey ' — differences  which  exist  in  the  Greek  as  well  as 
in  our  version — might  be  explained  by  regarding  the  two 
Greek  accounts  as  translations  from  a  common  Aramaic 
original.  This  supposition  evidently  gives  a  satisfactory 
explanation  of  all  variations  between  the  Gospels  which  are 
confined  to  words  and  do  not  affect  the  sense.  Some  inge 
nious  critics  have  gone  further,  and  tried  to  show  how  some 
of  the  variations  which  do  affect  the  sense  might  have  arisen 

*  See  note,  pp.  116,  117. 


IX.]  POSSIBLE   EDITORIAL   CORRECTIONS.  143 

in  the  process  of  translation  from  an  Aramaic  original.  But 
I  do  not  feel  confidence  enough  in  any  of  these  explanations 
to  think  it  worth  while  to  report  them  to  you. 

Even  when  the  sense  is  unaffected,  the  idea  may  be  pushed 
too  far,  and  we  may  easily  mistake  for  translational  variations 
what  are  really  editorial  corrections.  For  example,  in  Mat 
thew  (ix.  12)  and  Mark  (ii.  17)  we  read,  '  They  that  are  strong 
(ot  to-xv'oi/res)  have  no  need  of  a  physician ; '  in  Luke  (v.  31) 
it  is  '  they  that  are  well'  (ot  vytatVovres).  Now  Matthew  and 
Luke  may  have  independently  translated  the  same  Aramaic 
word  by  different  Greek  ones ;  but  it  is  also  a  possible  sup 
position  that,  having  Matthew's  or  Mark's  Greek  before  him, 
but  knowing  that  our  Lord  had  not  spoken  in  Greek,  Luke 
purposely  altered  the  popular  phrase  ot  tcr^voi/rcs  into  the 
more  correct  word  to  denote  health,  vyiaiVoi/Tes.*  Again,  St. 
Mark  uses  several  words  which  we  know,  from  the  gram 
marian  Phrynichus,  were  regarded  as  vulgarisms  by  those 
who  aimed  at  elegance  of  Attic  style.  Such  are  ecrxarw?  e^ct 
(v.  23),  euo-x^wv  (xv.  43),  KoAAv/?io-rat  (xi.  15),  Kopdcriov  (v.  41), 
Kpd(3/3a.Tos  (ii.  4),  nov6<f>9a\iJLOS  (ix.  47),  6/>/a£a)  (v.  7),  pa7rtoy>ia 
(xiv.  65),  pact's  (x.  25)4  Now  when  Luke  avoids  all  these 
words,  we  cannot  infer  with  any  certainty  that  he  is  merely 
making  an  independent  translation  of  an  Aramaic  original. 

*  Similarly,  Luke  v.  18  has  Trapa\€\vfj.4vos,  not  Tra.pa\vTiK6s,  Mark  ii. 
3  ;  laffOai  (vi.  19),  not  8iacrw£eiv  (Matt.  xiv.  36) ;  Tprj/j.a  @e\6vr)s  (xviii.  25). 
not  TpuTTTj/io  £a(/n'5os  (Matt.  xix.  24),  or  Tpv^aXia  pcupiSos  (Mark  x.  25). 
Many  more  instances  of  the  kind  will  be  found  in  Dr.  Hobart's  interesting 
book  on  The  Medical  Language  of  St.  Luke.  In  this  work  the  Church 
tradition  that  the  author  of  the  Third  Gospel  and  of  the  Acts  of  the  Apostles 
was  the  same  person  (viz.  he  who  is  described  [Col.  iv.  14]  as  Luke 
the  beloved  physician)  is  confirmed  by  a  comparison  of  the  language  of 
these  books  with  that  of  Greek  medical  treatises.  The  result  is  to  show 
that  a  common  feature  of  the  Third  Gospel  and  the  Acts  is  the  use  of 
technical  medical  terms,  which  in  the  New  Testament  are  either  peculiar 
to  St.  Luke,  or  at  least  are  used  by  him  far  more  frequently  than  by  any 
other  of  the  writers.  Dr.  Hobart  sometimes  pushes  his  argument  too  far, 
forgetting  that  medical  writers  must  employ  ordinary  as  well  as  technical 
language,  and  therefore  that  every  word  frequently  found  in  medical  books 
cannot  fairly  be  claimed  as  a  term  in  which  medical  writers  can  be  supposed 
to  have  an  exclusive  property.  But  when  every  doubtful  instance  has  been 
struck  out  of  Dr.  Hobart's  lists,  enough  remain  to  establish  completely 
what  he  desires  to  prove. 

t  I  take  this  list  from  Dr.  Abbott's  article  '  Gospels '  in  the  ninth 
edition  of  the  Encyclopaedia  Britannica. 


144  THE    SYNOPTIC    GOSPELS.  [iX. 

The  case  may  be,  that  St.  Luke,  having  more  command  of 
the  Greek  language  than  the  other  Evangelists,  designedly 
altered  phrases  which  he  found  in  a  Greek  original  intended 
for  a  circle  of  readers  the  majority  of  whom  were  not  Greek 
by  birth,  and  who  habitually  spoke  the  Greek  language  with 
less  purity  than  those  for  whom  his  Gospel  was  composed. 

However  this  may  be,  the  hypothesis  of  an  Aramaic  original 
does  not  suffice  to  explain  all  the  phenomena.  For  there  are 
very  many  passages  where  the  Evangelists  agree  in  the  use 
of  Greek  words,  which  it  is  not  likely  could  have  been  hit  on 
independently  by  different  translators.  If  such  cases  are  to 
be  explained  by  the  use  of  a  common  original,  that  original 
must  have  been  in  the  Greek  language.  On  the  CTTICWO-IOS 
of  the  Lord's  Prayer,  though  the  word  plainly  belongs  to  the 
class  of  which  I  speak,  I  do  not  lay  stress,  because  we  can 
well  believe  that  a  liturgical  use  of  that  Prayer  in  Greek  had 
become  common  before  our  Gospels  were  written ;  and  such 
a  use  would  affect  the  language  of  translators.  Nor  again  can 
I  lay  stress  on  a  very  striking  and  oft-cited  specimen :  Matt. 
xxi.  44,  6  Treo-wv  evrt  rov  \iOov  TOVTOV  dvvOXaorOrjfrerai,  e<£'  ov  o* 
av  Treo-y,  Xt/cjurjcret  avTov.  We  have  the  very  same  words  in  St. 
Luke  xx.  1 8,  with  only  the  exception  of  e/ceti/oi/  X(.6ov  for  \i6ov 
TOVTOV.  It  is  certainly  not  likely  that  two  independent  trans 
lators  from  the  Aramaic  should  hit  on  identical  expressions. 
But  though  the  words  I  have  read  are  found  in  the  text  of 
St.  Matthew,  as  given  by  an  overwhelming  majority  of  Greek 
MSS.,  including  all  the  oldest ;  yet  there  is  a  minority,  insig 
nificant  in  numbers,  no  doubt,  but  sufficient  to  establish  the 
fact  that  a  text  from  which  these  words  were  wanting  early 
obtained  some  circulation.  And  then  we  must  admit  it  to  be 
possible  that  the  shorter  reading  represents  the  original  text 
of  St.  Matthew ;  and  the  longer,  one  which  a  very  early  tran 
scriber  had  filled  up  by  an  addition  from  St.  Luke.  We  have 
no  need  to  insist  on  any  doubtful  cases,  the  instances  of  the 
use  of  common  words  being  so  numerous.  And  in  order  to 
feel  the  force  of  the  argument  you  need  only  put  in  parallel 
columns  the  corresponding  passages  in  the  different  Evange 
lists:  say,  of  the  parable  of  the  Sower  or  of  the  answer  to  the 
question  about  fasting  (Mark  ii.  18-22;  Matt.  ix.  14-17;  Luke 


IX.]  A   COMMON   GREEK   ORIGINAL   NECESSARY.  145 

v.  33-39),  when  you  will  find  such  a  continuous  use  of  common 
words  as  to  forbid  the  idea  that  we  have  before  us  independent 
translations  from  another  language.* 

The  use  of  a  common  Greek  original  is  further  established 
by  a  study  of  the  form  of  the  Old  Testament  quotations  in  the 
Gospels.  Several  such  quotations  are  peculiar  to  St.  Matthew, 
and  are  introduced  by  him  with  the  formula  'that  it  might  be 
fulfilled.'  In  these  cases  the  ordinary  rule  is,  that  the  Evan 
gelist  does  not  take  the  quotation  from  the  LXX.,  but  translates 
directly  from  the  Hebrew.  It  is  otherwise  in  the  case  of 
quotations  which  Matthew  has  in  common  with  other  Evan 
gelists.  As  a  rule  they  are  taken  from  the  LXX.,  and  when 
they  deviate  from  our  text  of  the  LXX.  all  agree  in  the 
deviation.  For  example,  all  three  quote  Malachi's  prophecy 
in  the  form — i$ov,  aTroo-TeXAw  TOV  ayyeAoV  pov  Trpo  Trpoo-wTrou 
<rov,  os  KaTacr/ceuao-ei  ryv  6SoV  a~ov  (Matt.  xi.  10;  Mark  i.  2; 
Luke  vii.  27).  Here  the  LXX.  has  iSov,  c^a-Troo-reAXw  r.  a.  /*., 
xal  €7ri/?Ae/i/'eTat  o&bv  Trpo  Trpoo-toTrov  fjiov.  Similarly,  Matt.  xv. 
8,  9,  is  in  verbal  agreement  with  Mark  vii.  6,  7,  but  the 
quotation  is  considerably  different  from  the  LXX.  In  Matt, 
iv.  10;  Luke  iv.  8,  both  Evangelists  have  'Thou  shalt  worship 
the  Lord  thy  God,'  while  the  LXX.  have  'Thou  shalt  fear.' 

The  result  is,  that  if  an  Aramaic  original  document  is 
assumed  in  order  to  account  for  the  verbal  variations  of  the 
Gospels,  a  Greek  original  (whether  a  translation  of  that 
Aramaic  or  otherwise)  is  found  to  be  equally  necessary  in 
order  to  explain  their  verbal  coincidences. 

Again,  there  are  verbal  coincidences  between  St.  Matthew 
and  St.  Luke  in  their  account  of  our  Lord's  temptation  and 
other  stories  not  found  in  St.  Mark.  If  we  account  for  Mark's 
omission  by  the  solution  that  these  stories  were  not  contained 
in  the  document  used  by  all  three  Evangelists,  we  are  tempted 
to  imagine  a  second  document  used  by  Matthew  and  Luke. 
Thus  in  hypotheses  of  this  nature  documents  have  a  tendency 


*  See  also  p.  117.  Other  examples  of  common  words  are — avdyaioy 
(Mark  xiv.  15;  Luke  xxii.  12);  8vffit6\<t>s  (Matt.  xix.  23;  Mark  x.  23; 
Luke  xviii.  24)  ;  Kare'/cAao-e  (Mark  vi.  41  ;  Luke  ix.  16)  Ko\of}ovv  (Matt, 
xxiv.  22 ,  Mark  xiii.  20)  ;  Trrepvyiov  (Matt.  iv.  5  ;  Luke  iv.  9)  ; 
(Matt.  vii.  5  ;  Luke  vi.  42). 

L 


146  THE    SYNOPTIC    GOSPELS.  [iX. 

to  multiply.  Eichhorn,*  for  example,  having  put  forward  in 
1 794  the  idea  of  an  Aramaic  original  from  different  recensions 
of  which  the  different  Gospels  had  sprung,  Marshf  pointed 
out  the  necessity  of  a  Greek  original  also;  and  he  constructed 
an  elaborate  history,  how,  out  of  ten  different  documents, 
which  he  distinguished  by  different  Hebrew,  Greek,  and 
Roman  letters,  the  Synoptic  Gospels  severally  took  their 
origin.  Eichhorn  then,  in  the  second  edition  of  his  Intro 
duction,  adopted  Marsh's  theory  as  to  its  general  outline,  but 
added  to  the  number  of  assumed  documents,  and  otherwise 
complicated  the  history.  It  is  not  wonderful  that  these 
theories  found  little  acceptance  with  subsequent  scholars, 
who  have  not  been  able  to  believe  in  so  complicated  a  his 
tory,  resting  on  no  external  evidence,  and  obtained  solely  by 
the  inventor's  power  of  critical  divination.  Nor,  indeed,  is 
there  much  to  attract  in  a  theory  which  almost  assumes  that 
in  the  production  of  their  Gospels,  Matthew,  Mark,  and 
Luke  used  no  other  instrument  of  composition  than  paste 
and  scissors. 

It  may  further  be  remarked  that  as  the  number  of  docu 
ments  is  increased,  the  documentary  theory  ceases  to  differ 
much  from  that  which  makes  a  common  oral  tradition  the 
basis  of  the  Gospel  narratives.  On  the  latter  hypothesis 
nothing  forbids  us  to  suppose  that  each  story  when  orally 
delivered  may  have  been  separately  written  down  by  the 
hearers,  so  that  the  hypothesis  is  practically  equivalent  to 
one  which  assumes  as  the  basis  a  large  number  of  inde 
pendent  documents. 

I  certainly  have  not  courage  to  follow  out  the  documen 
tary  hypothesis  into  details  ;  but  one  is  strongly  tempted  to 
examine  whether  it  does  not  at  least  afford  the  best  account 
of  the  matter  common  to  the  three  Synoptics.  If  you  wish 


*  Eichhorn  (1752-1827),  Professor  at  Jena  and  afterwards  at  Gottingen, 
published  his  Introduction  to  the  New  Testament  in  successive  volumes,  first 
edition,  1804-1812;  second  edition,  1820-1827. 

t  Herbert  Marsh  (1758-1839),  Bishop  of  Peterborough  in  1819,  having 
himself  studied  in  Germany,  did  much  to  introduce  into  England  a  know 
ledge  of  German  theological  speculation.  The  theory  referred  to  in  the 
text  was  put  forward  in  1803  in  an  Appendix  to  his  translation  of  Michaelis's 
Introduction  to  the  New  Testament. 


ix.]  THE  'TRIPLE  TRADITION.'  147 

to  pursue  this  study  you  can  now  do  so  luxuriously  by  means 
of  Mr.  Rushbrooke's  Synopticon,  published  by  Macmillan  in 
1880.  The  corresponding  passages  are  printed  in  parallel 
columns,  matter  common  to  the  three  Synoptics  being  printed 
in  red,  and  that  common  to  each  two  being  also  distinguished 
by  differences  of  type.  Mr.  Rushbrooke's  work  was  undertaken 
at  the  suggestion  of  Dr.  Edwin  Abbott,  whose  article  '  Gospels ' 
in  the  Encyclopaedia  Britannica  contains  a  summary  of  results 
thus  obtained.  Dr.  Abbott  gives  in  detail  the  contents  of 
what  he  calls  the  '  triple  tradition ' — that  is  to  say,  the  matter 
common  to  the  three  Synoptics  ;  then  of  the  three  double 
traditions — that  is  to  say,  the  matter  common  to  each  pair ; 
and,  lastly,  the  addition  which  each  separately  has  made  to 
the  common  tradition.  Dr.  Abbott  has  accompanied  his 
analysis  with  many  acute  remarks,  but  there  are  some  con 
siderations  which  it  seems  to  me  he  has  not  sufficiently 
attended  to,  and  which  ought  to  be  kept  in  mind  by  way  of 
caution  by  anyone  who  uses  his  work. 

In  the  first  place,  it  is  obvious  that  the  phrases  '  triple 
tradition,'  '  twofold  tradition,'  express  phenomena  as  they 
appear  to  us,  not  things  as  they  are  in  themselves.  You 
would  feel  that  a  man  knew  very  little  of  astronomy  if  he 
spoke  of  the  full  moon,  and  the  half  moon,  and  the  new 
moon,  in  such  a  way  as  to  lead  one  to  think  that  he  took 
these  for  three  distinct  heavenly  bodies,  and  not  for  the  same 
body  differently  illuminated.  Now,  considering  that  the  triple 
tradition  becomes  a  double  tradition  every  time  that  one  of 
the  three  writers  who  transmit  it  chooses  to  leave  out  a  word 
or  a  sentence,  we  are  bound  in  our  study  of  the  subject  con 
stantly  to  bear  in  mind  the  possibility  that  the  triple  and 
the  double,  and  perhaps  even  the  single  tradition,  may  be 
only  the  same  thing  differently  illuminated. 

The  business  of  science  is  to  interpret  phenomena:  to 
deduce  from  the  appearances  the  facts  that  underlie  them. 
The  work,  no  doubt,  must  begin  by  an  accurate  study  of  the 
phenomena,  but  it  must  not  stop  there.  When  the  painter 
Northcote  was  asked  with  what  he  mixed  his  colours,  he 
answered :  '  With  brains.'  The  deduction  of  the  original 
tradition  from  the  existing  narratives  must  be  done  by 

L  2 


iq-S  THE   SYNOPTIC    GOSPELS.  [iX. 

brains  ;  it  cannot  be  done  merely  by  blue  and  red  pencils. 
The  present  is  not  the  only  case  in  which  it  has  been 
attempted  to  restore  a  lost  document  by  means  of  the 
use  made  of  it  by  three  independent  writers.*  But  was  ever 
critic  unintelligent  enough  to  imagine  that  such  a  restoration 
could  be  effected  by  the  mechanical  process  of  taking  out 
the  words  common  to  the  three  more  recent  writers  ?  Surely 
a  careful  study  of  the  things  in  which  two  of  the  witnesses 
agree  is  essential  to  the  investigation;  for  in  such  a  case  it 
appears,  at  first  sight,  a  more  probable  explanation  that  the 
third  witness  here,  for  some  reason,  did  not  care  to  copy  the 
common  document,  than  that  the  other  two  here  both  de 
serted  it  and  agreed  in  drawing  their  information  from  a 
new  common  source.  Moreover,  it  ought  also  to  be  examined 
whether  for  the  purposes  of  the  investigation  the  three 
witnesses  are  all  of  equal  value,  or  whether  one  does  not 
show  signs  of  having  adhered  closer  to  his  original  than  the 
others.  For  in  the  latter  case  a  probable  claim  to  belong  to 
the  common  original  might  be  made  on  behalf  of  things  re 
ported  by  that  witness,  though  not  confirmed  by  the  other 
two.f 

Now,  Dr.  Abbott  dispenses  too  summarily  with  all  this 
brain-work.  Having  crossed  out  of  his  New  Testament  all 
the  words  that  are  not  common  to  the  three  Synoptics,  he 
forthwith  accepts  the  residuum  as  the  'original  tradition  upon 
which  the  Synoptic  Gospels  are  based,'  or  at  least  as  repre 
senting  that  tradition  as  nearly  as  we  can  now  approach  to 
it;  and  in  his  work  the  name  'triple  tradition'  is  constantly 
used  so  as  to  convey  the  idea  of  '  original  tradition.'! 

*  I  refer  in  particular  to  the  attempt  made  by  Lipsius  in  his  Quellen- 
kritik  des  Epiphanios  to  restore  a  common  document  used  by  three 
writers  on  heresy — Epiphanius,  Philaster,  and  pseudo-Tertullian. 

t  Thus  there  is  a  general  agreement  among  critics  that  St.  Mark 
adhered  to  the  common  document  more  closely  than  the  other  two 
Evangelists,  and  some  have  even  supposed  that  his  Gospel  exactly  was  the 
common  document.  I  do  not  believe  that  it  was,  but  I  believe  that  it  re 
presents  it  infinitely  more  closely  than  does  Dr.  Abbott's  'triple  tradition/ 

J  Since  the  first  edition  of  this  lecture  was  printed,  Dr.  Abbott,  in 
conjunction  with  Mr.  Rushbrooke,  has  published  what  he  calls  The 
Common  Tradition  of  the  Synoptic  Gospels  ;  and  he  promises  to  follow  it 
up  with  another  volume  containing  the  '  Double  Tradition,'  that  is  to  say, 


IX.]  THE    '  TRIPLE   TRADITION.'  149 

Thus  the'  triple  tradition  is  said  to  verify  itself,  because 
the  sayings  of  Jesus  as  they  appear  in  it  answer  to  Justin 
Martyr's  description  of  being  *  short,  pithy,  and  abrupt.' 
But  how  could  they  be  otherwise  ?  If  the  most  diffuse 
orator  in  the  kingdom  were  treated  in  the  same  way,  and 
only  those  portions  of  his  speeches  recognized  as  genuine,  of 
which  three  distinct  hearers  gave  a  report  in  identical  words, 
the  fragments  that  survived  such  a  test  would  assuredly  be 
yS/aa^et?  KCU  O-VI/TO/AOI,  short,  and  very  much  cut  up.*  But  Dr. 
Abbott  commits  a  far  more  serious  mistake,  in  the  tacit 
-assumption  he  makes  in  proposing  to  search  for  *  the  original 
tradition  upon  which  the  Synoptic  Gospels  are  based.'  Admit 
that  the  Synoptic  Evangelists  used  a  common  document,  and 
we  are  yet  not  entitled  to  assume  without  examination  that 
this  contained  a  complete  Gospel,  or  that  it  was  more  than 
one  of  the  materials  they  employed.  Dr.  Abbott  treats  the 
triple  tradition  as  if  it  were  not  only  the  original  Gospel,  but 
represented  it  in  so  complete  a  form  that  its  omissions  might 
be  used  to  discredit  later  additions  to  the  story.  Thus  the 
*  triple  tradition '  does  not  contain  the  story  of  our  Lord's 
Resurrection,  and  of  all  the  miracles  ascribed  to  Him  it 
relates  only  six.f 

the  portions  of  the  Synoptic  narrative  common  to  two  Evangelists.  This 
rending  the  evidence  in  two  seems  to  me  as  sensible  a  proceeding  as  if  a 
printseller  were  to  cut  his  stereoscopic  slides  in  two  and  sell  them  separately. 
The  double  traditions  are  an  essential  part  of  the  evidence  by  which  the 
common  original  is  to  be  recovered.  It  must  be  remembered  also  that, 
even  if  it  be  granted  that  the  '  triple  tradition '  and  the  three  '  double 
traditions '  represent  four  different  documents,  one  at  least  of  the  '  double 
traditions  '  stands  on  a  level  with  the  '  triple  tradition  '  as  respects  claims 
to  antiquity.  A  document  antecedent  to  the  two  earliest  of  our  Synoptics 
must  be  antecedent  to  all  three. 

*  Here  is  the  narrative  of  two  miracles,  as  given  in  the  '  triple  tradition : ' 

(1)  ...  to  the  mountain    .  .   walking  on  the  sea    .  .   it  is  I,  be 

not  afraid. 

(2)  He  came  into  the  house  .  .  not  dead  but  sleepeth,  and  they 

mocked  him.    .  .    Having   taken  her  by  the  hand  .  . 

arise. 

t  This  limitation  of  number,  combined  with  the  casting  out  of  many  of 
the  details,  facilitates  much  the  application  of  the  methods  of  Paulus  (see 
p.  10) ;  and  the  curious  reader  will  find  in  the  Appendix  to  Dr.  Abbott's 
Through  Nature  to  Christ  how  all  six  may  be  explained  as  being  cases 
where  either  the  spectators  of  the  supposed  miracle  imagined  occurrences 
to  be  supernatural,  which  in  truth  were  not  so,  or  elsewhere  the  language 
•used  by  the  reporters  of  the  event  was  misunderstood. 


150  THE    SYNOPTIC    GOSPELS.  [iX. 

It  is  certainly  worth  considering,  if  we  could  find  the 
'  original  Gospel,'  what  would  be  its  value  as  compared  with 
those  we  have.  Suppose,  for  instance,  we  could  recover  one 
of  those  earlier  Gospels  which  Luke  mentions  in  his  preface, 
that  would  certainly  be  entitled  to  be  called  an  'original 
Gospel.'  It  was  probably  defective  rather  than  erroneous  ; 
and  we  may  certainly  believe  that  all  that  was  not  erroneous 
has  been  embodied  by  St.  Luke  in  his  work,  so  that  by  a 
simple  process  of  erasure,  if  we  only  knew  how  to  perform 
it,  we  might  recover  all  that  was  valuable  in  the  '  original 
Gospel.'  But  would  that  be  an  improvement  on  St.  Luke? 
The  Primitive  Church  did  not  think  so,  which  allowed  the 
earlier  work  to  drop  into  oblivion.  But  could  it  now  be 
restored,  the  whirligig  of  time  would  bring  in  its  revenges. 
In  the  eyes  of  modern  critics  every  one  of  its  omissions 
would  be  a  merit.  '  It  only  relates  six  miracles.'  '  What  a 
prize  ! '  'It  does  not  tell  the  story  of  the  Resurrection/ 
'  Why,  it  is  a  perfect  treasure  ! ' 

But  before  we  can  build  an  argument  on  the  omissions  of  a 
document,  we  must  know  what  it  aims  at  doing ;  and  as  far 
as  the  '  triple  tradition '  is  concerned,  quite  a  new  light  is 
cast  on  the  matter  when  we  examine  it  more  closely.  We 
find,  then,  that  it  is  certainly  true  that  this  tradition  gives  no 
account  of  the  Resurrection  ;  but  then  it  is  also  true  that  it 
does  not  contain  the  history  of  the  Passion  :  in  other  words, 
it  was  no  complete  Gospel,  but  at  most  the  narrative  of  cer 
tain  events  given  by  a  single  relater.  Compare  the  story  of 
jthe  Crucifixion,  as  told  by  St.  Luke,  with  that  told  by  St. 
Matthew  and  St.  Mark,  and  we  find  the  two  accounts  com 
pletely  independent,  having  scarcely  anything  in  common 
except  what  results  necessarily  from  the  fact  that  both  are 
histories  of  the  same  event.  Again,  though  with  regard  to 
this  history,  Matthew  and  Mark  are  in  close  agreement,  the 
nature  of  this  agreement  is  quite  different  from  that  which 
prevails  in  the  earlier  narrative.  There  the  two  Evangelists 
present  the  appearance  of  using  the  same  source,  though  in  a 
different  way,  Matthew  reproducing  it  in  an  abridged  form, 
Mark  with  an  abundance  of  pictorial  detail.  In  the  history 
of  the  Passion,  on  the  contrary,  the  relation  between  Matthew 


IX.]  MEANING   OF    'TRIPLE    TRADITION.'  151 

and  Mark  is  constantly  one  of  simple  copying.  We  may 
conclude  then  with  confidence  that  if  the  three  Evangelists 
drew  their  history  from  a  common  source,  that  source  did 
not  extend  so  far  as  the  relation  of  the  Passion. 

There  is  one  remark,  obvious  enough  when  it  is  made,  but 
of  which  it  is  quite  necessary  for  you  to  take  notice,  viz.  that 
'triple  tradition'  does  not  mean  'triply  attested  tradition,' 
but  singly  attested  tradition.  If  you  compare  the  history  of 
the  early  Church,  as  told  by  three  modem  historians,  you 
will  find  several  places  where  they  relate  a  story  in  nearly 
identical  words.  In  such  a  case  an  intelligent  critic  would 
recognize  at  once  that  we  had,  not  a  story  attested  by  three 
independent  authorities,  but  one  resting  on  the  credit  of  a 
single  primary  authority,  coming  through  different  channels. 
When  we  come  further  down  in  the  history,  and  Eusebius 
is  no  longer  the  unique  source  of  information,  exactly  as 
authorities  become  numerous,  verbal  agreement  between  the 
histories  ceases,  and  our  '  triple  tradition '  comes  to  an  end. 
Thus,  instead  of  its  being  true  that  the  '  triple  tradition '  is 
the  most  numerously  attested  portion  of  the  Gospel  narrative, 
we  may  conclude  that  this  is  just  the  part  for  which  we  have 
a  single  primary  authority.  Now,  when  the  first  Christian 
converts  desired  to  hear  the  story  of  their  Master's  life  there 
would  be  no  difficulty  in  finding  many  who  could  tell  them  of 
the  Passion  and  the  Resurrection.  Everyone  who  had  lived 
through  that  eventful  week,  in  which  the  triumph  of  Palm 
Sunday  was  so  rapidly  exchanged  for  the  despair  of  Good 
Friday,  and  that,  again,  for  the  abiding  joy  of  Easter  Sunday, 
would  have  all  the  events  indelibly  burned  on  his  memory. 
In  comparison  with  these  events,  those  of  the  Galilean 
ministry  would  retire  into  the  far  back  distance  of  things 
that  had  occurred  years  ago  ;  and  there  would  be  more  than 
the  ordinary  difficulty  we  all  experience,  when  we  unex 
pectedly  lose  one  whom  we  love,  of  recalling  words  which  we 
should  have  taken  pains  to  treasure  in  our  memory,  could  we 
have  foreseen  we  should  hear  no  such  words  again.  I  have 
often  thought  that  the  direction  to  the  Apostles  to  return  to 
Galilee  for  the  interval  between  the  Resurrection  and  the  gift 
of  the  Holy  Ghost  was  given  in  order  to  provide  them  with  a 


I52  THE    SYNOPTIC    GOSPELS.  [iX. 

season  for  retirement  and  recollection,  such  as  they  could  not 
have  again  after  they  had  become  the  rulers  of  the  newly- 
formed  Church.  When  we  return  to  the  place  where  we  last 
conversed  with  a  departed  friend,  as  we  walk  over  the  ground 
we  trod  together,  the  words  he  then  spoke  rise  spontaneously 
to  the  mind  ;  and  nothing  forbids  us  to  believe  that  the  Holy 
Spirit,  whose  work  it  was  to  bring  to  the  disciples'  memory 
the  things  that  Jesus  had  said,  employed  the  ordinary  laws 
which  govern  the  suggestion  of  human  thoughts.  Yet  so 
difficult  is  it,  as  I  have  already  observed,  to  remember  with 
accuracy  words  spoken  at  some  distance  of  time,  that  there 
would  be  nothing  surprising  if  the  story  of  the  Galilean 
ministry  mainly  depended  on  a  single  witness,  whose  recol 
lections  were  so  much  the  fullest  and  most  accurate  that 
they  were  accepted  and  adopted  by  all. 

It  seems  to  me  that  if  it  be  admitted  that  the  '  triple  tra 
dition  '  rests  on  the  testimony  of  a  single  witness,  we  can  go 
very  near  determining  who  that  witness  was.     Take  the  very 
commencement  of  this  '  triple  tradition/     The  whole  of  the 
first  chapter  of  St.  Mark  is  occupied  with  a  detailed  account 
of  the  doings  of  one  day  of  our  Lord's  ministry.     It  was  the 
Sabbath  which  immediately  followed  the  call  of  Simon  and 
Andrew,  John  and  James.  We  are  told  of  our  Lord's  teaching 
in  the  Synagogue,  of  the  healing  of  the  demoniac  there,  of 
the  entry  of  the  Saviour  into  Simon's  house,  the  healing  of 
his  wife's  mother,  and  then  in  the  evening,  when  the  close  of 
the  Sabbath  permitted  the  moving  of  the  sick,  the  crowd  of 
people  about  the  door  seeking  to  be  healed  of  their  diseases. 
In  whose  recollections  is  it  likely  that  that  one  day  would 
stand  out  in  such  prominence  ?     Surely,  we  may  reasonably 
conjecture  that  the  narrator  must  have  been  one  of  those  four 
to  whom  the  call  to  follow  Jesus  had  made  that  day  a  crisis 
or  turning-point  in  their  lives.     The  narrator  could  not  well 
have  been  John,  whose  authorship  is  claimed  for  a  different 
story ;  nor  could  it  have  been  Andrew,  who  was  not  present 
at  some  other  scenes  depicted  in  this  '  triple  tradition,'  such 
as  the  Transfiguration  and  the  healing  of  Jairus's  daughter. 
There  remain  then  but  Peter  and  James  the  son  of  Zebedee  ; 
and  it  is  again  the  history  of  the  Transfiguration  which  deter- 


IX.]  AUTOPTIC    CHARACTER    OF   SECOND   GOSPEL.  153 

mines  our  choice  in  favour  of  Peter ;  for  to  whom  else  is  it 
likely  that  we  can  owe  our  knowledge  of  the  words  he  caught 
himself  saying  as  he  was  roused  from  his  heavy  sleep,  though 
unable,  when  fully  awake,  to  explain  what  he  had  meant  by 
them  ?  It  seems  to  me  then  that  we  are  quite  entitled  to  sub 
stitute,  for  the  phrase  'triple  tradition,'  '  Petrine  tradition  ;' 
-and  to  assert  that  a  portion,  if  not  the  whole  of  the  matter 
common  to  the  three  Synoptics,  is  based  on  what  Peter  was 
able  to  state  of  his  recollections  of  our  Lord's  Galilean  ministry. 
Although  I  have  given  reasons  for  thinking  that  these  recol 
lections  had  been  arranged  into  a  continuous  narrative  before 
the  time  of  the  composition  of  the  Synoptics,  we  are  not 
bound  to  believe  that  this  had  been  done  by  Peter  himself. 
These  recollections  would  naturally  have  been  made  use  of 
-by  some  of  those  who,  as  St.  Luke  tells  us,  had  before  him 
attempted  to  arrange  an  orderly  narrative  of  the  Saviour's 
life  ;  and  when  St.  Luke  entered  on  the  same  work,  with 
more  abundant  materials  and  more  certain  knowledge,  he 
might  still  have  followed  the  order  of  his  predecessors  as 
regards  the  truly  apostolic  traditions  which  they  did  record. 

Thus  are  we  led,  by  internal  evidence  solely,  to  what 
Papias  stated  had  been  communicated  to  him  as  a  tradition, 
viz.,  that  Mark  in  his  Gospel  recorded  things  related  by  Peter  ; 
but  we  must  add,  not  Mark  alone,  but  Luke  and  Matthew  also 
— only  we  may  readily  grant  that  it  is  Mark  who  tells  the 
stories  with  such  graphic  fulness  of  detail  as  to  give  us  most 
nearly  the  very  words  of  the  eyewitness.  To  this  Renan 
bears  testimony.  He  says  (p.  xxxix.): '  Mark  is  full  of  minute 
observations,  which,  without  any  doubt,  come  from  an  eye 
witness.  Nothing  forbids  us  to  think  that  this  eyewitness, 
who  evidently  had  followed  Jesus,  who  had  loved  Him,  and 
looked  on  Him  very  close  at  hand,  and  who  had  preserved  a 
lively  image  of  Him,  was  the  Apostle  Peter  himself,  as  Papias 
would  have  us  believe.' 

If  you  will  take  the  trouble  to  compare  any  of  the  stories 
recorded  by  St.  Mark  with  the  corresponding  passages  in 
the  other  Evangelists,  you  will  be  pretty  sure  to  find  some 
example  of  these  autoptic  touches.  Read,  for  instance,  the 
history  of  the  miracle  performed  on  the  return  from  the 


154  THE    SYNOPTIC    GOSPELS.  [iX, 

mount  of  Transfiguration  (ix.  14),  and  you  will  find  the  story 
told  from  the  point  of  view  of  one  of  the  little  company  who 
descended  with  our  Lord.  We  are  told  of  the  conversation 
our  Lord  held  with  them  on  the  way  down.  Next  we  are 
told  how,  when  they  caught  sight  of  the  other  disciples,  they 
saw  them  surrounded  by  a  multitude,  and  scribes  questioning 
with  them  ;  and  how  when  our  Lord  became  visible  there  was- 
a  rush  of  the  crowd  running  to  Him.  It  is  then  Mark  alone 
who  records  the  conversation  between  our  Lord  and  the 
parent  of  the  demoniac  child;  who  tells  the  father's  half- 
despairing  appeal:  'If  thou  canst  do  anything;'  and  then, 
when  our  Lord  has  said  that  all  things  are  possible  to  him 
that  believeth,  the  parent's  agonizing  cry:  'Lord,  I  believe, 
help  thou  mine  unbelief;'  and  then,  as  the  child's  convulsive 
struggles  drew  new  crowds  running,  the  performance  of  the 
miracle.  This  one  narrative  would  suffice  to  banish  the  idea, 
taken  up  by  some  hasty  readers,  that  Mark  was  a  mere  copyist 
and  abridger — an  idea  indeed  countenanced  by  St.  Augustine, 
who  says  of  Mark,  *  Matthseum  secutus  tanquam  pedissequus 
et  breviator'  (De  consent.  Evangg.  i.  4).  It  is  Mark  who 
tells  that  when  children  were  brought  to  our  Lord,  He  took 
them  up  in  His  arms  and  blessed  them  (ix.  36,  x.  16).  It  is 
Mark  who,  in  telling  of  the  feeding  of  the  multitude  (vi.  39), 
depicts  the  companies  showing  as  garden-beds  (Trpao-ial 
TT/oao-tai)  on  the  'green  grass.'  It  is  Mark  who  tells  of  the 
little  boats  which  accompanied  the  vessel  in  which,  during 
the  storm,  our  Lord  lay  asleep  on  the  pillow;  Mark  again 
who  tells  of  the  look  of  love  which  our  Lord  cast  on  the 
young  man  (x.  17)  who  asked  what  he  should  do  to  inherit 
eternal  life;  and  again  of  His  look  of  anger  on  the  hypocrites 
who  watched  Him  (iii.  5).  I  have  already  referred  to  Mark's 
record  of  different  Aramaic  words  used  by  our  Lord.  He 
gives  us  also  several  proper  names — the  name  of  the  father 
of  Levi  the  publican,  the  name  and  father's  name  of  the  blind 
man  healed  at  Jericho,  and  the  names  of  the  sons  of  Simon 
of  Gyrene.  Baur  struggled  hard  to  maintain  that  all  these 
details  were  but  arbitrary  additions  of  a  later  writer,  who 
having  a  pretty  turn  for  invention  and  an  eye  for  pictorial 
details,  used  his  gifts  in  ornamenting  the  simple  narrative 


IX.]  MATTHEW   AND   LUKE   DID   NOT   COPY   MARK.  155 

of  the  primitive  Gospel.  But  subsequent  criticism  has 
generally  acknowledged  the  view  to  be  truer  which  recog 
nizes  in  these  details  particulars  which  had  fastened  them 
selves  on  the  memory  of  an  eyewitness.  And  I  cannot  read 
the  early  chapters  of  St.  Mark  without  the  conviction  that  here 
we  have  the  narrative,  not  only  in  its  fuller  but  in  its  older 
form.  Observe  how  carefully  the  name  Peter  is  withheld 
from  that  Apostle  until  the  time  when  it  was  conferred  by 
our  Lord:  in  the  opening  chapters  he  is  only  called  Simon. 
Again,  Mark  alone  tells  of  the  alarm  into  which  our  Lord's 
family  was  cast  by  His  assuming  the  office  of  a  public  teacher: 
how  they  thought  He  was  out  of  His  mind,  and  wished  to  put 
Him  under  restraint.  Again,  on  comparing  Mark's  phrase, 
vi.  3  :  '  the  carpenter,  the  son  of  Mary,'  with  Matthew's  in  the 
parallel  passage,  xiii.  55:  'the  carpenter's  son,  the  son  of 
Joseph,'  I  am  disposed  to  accept  the  former  as  the  older 
form.  When  Jesus  first  came  forward,  He  would  probably 
be  known  in  His  own  city  as  the  carpenter ;  and  if,  as  seems 
likely,  Joseph  was  dead  at  the  time,  as  the  son  of  Mary. 
But  after  our  Lord  devoted  Himself  to  the  work  of  public 
teaching,  and  ceased  to  labour  at  His  trade,  He  would  be 
known  as  the  carpenter's  son.  Justin  Martyr  shows  his 
knowledge  of  both  Gospels  by  his  use  of  both  titles.  On 
the  whole,  internal  evidence  gives  ample  confirmation  to  the 
tradition  that  Mark's  Gospel  took  its  origin  in  a  request, 
made  by  those  who  desired  to  have  a  permanent  record 
of  the  things  Peter  had  said,  that  Peter's  trusted  companion 
should  furnish  them  with  such  a  record.* 

Does  it  follow,  then,  that  Mark's  was  the  earliest  Gospel 
of  all,  and  that  it  was  used  by  the  other  two  Evangelists  ? 
Not  necessarily;  and  the  result  of  such  comparison  as  I  have 
been  able  to  make  is  to  lead  me  to  believe  that  Matthew  and 
Luke  did  not  copy  Mark,  but  that  all  drew  from  a  common 

*  I  fear  Klostermann's  remark  is  a  little  too  ingenious  (cited  by  Godet, 
Etudes  Bibliques,  ii.  38),  that  some  statements  become  clearer  if  we  go 
back  from  Mark's  third  person  to  Peter's  first.  For  example  (Mark  i.  29) : 
'  They  entered  into  the  house  of  Simon  and  Andrew,  with  James  and 
John.'  If  we  look  for  the  antecedent  of  '  they,'  we  find  that  it  includes 
James  and  John.  But  all  would  have  been  clear  in  Peter's  narrative,  '  We 
entered  into  our  house  with  James  and  John.' 


156  THE    SYNOPTIC    GOSPELS.  [iX. 

source,  which,  however,  is  represented  most  fully  and  with 
most  verbal  exactness  in  St.  Mark's  version.  It  is  even 
possible  that  the  second  Gospel  may  be  the  latest  of  the 
three.  It  contains  a  good  deal  more  than  the  Petrine  tra 
dition  ;  and  it  is  conceivable  that  when  Mark  was  asked  to 
record  that  tradition,  he  chose  to  complete  it  into  a  Gospel ; 
and  that  he  may  even  have  used  in  his  work  the  other 
two  Synoptics,  which  may  have  been  then  already  written. 
Whether  they  were  so  or  not  is  a  question  on  which  I  do  not 
feel  confidence  in  taking  a  side. 

It  has  been  contended  that  the  fact  that  Mark  contains  so 
little  outside  the  Petrine  tradition,  that  is  not  found  either  in 
Matthew  or  Luke,  is  most  easily  explained  on  the  supposition 
that  he  was  the  latest ;  for  if  it  was  the  case  that  the  other 
two  Evangelists  had  used  his  work,  it  is  hardly  likely  that  their 
borrowings  would  have  so  supplemented  each  other  as  to  leave 
nothing  behind.  Although  in  many  places  Mark's  narrative 
compared  with  the  others  shows  clear  indications  of  priority, 
^  ^  there  are  other  places  where  I  find  no  such  indications,  and 
where  the  hypothesis  that  Mark  simply  copied  Matthew  or 
\  /Luke  seems  quite  permissible. 

But  here  the  question  becomes  complicated  with  one  on 
criticism  of  the  text ;  for  our  decision  is  seriously  affected 
according  as  we  recognize  or  not  the  last  twelve  verses  as  an 
integral  part  of  the  Gospel.  Some  of  these  verses  appear  to 
give  an  abridged  account  of  what  is  more  fully  told  elsewhere: 
in  particular,  one  of  them  reads  like  a  brief  reference  to  Luke's 
account  of  the  appearence  to  the  two  disciples  at  Emmaus. 
The  current  of  critical  opinion  runs  so  strongly  in  favour  of 
the  rejection  of  these  verses  that  it  seems  presumptuous  to 
oppose  it.  But  no  one  can  be  required  to  subscribe  to  a 
verdict  which  he  believes  to  be  contrary  to  the  evidence  ;  and 
he  sufficiently  satisfies  the  demands  of  modesty  if,  in  differing 
from  the  opinion  of  persons  of  higher  authority  than  himself, 
he  expresses  his  dissent  with  a  due  sense  of  his  own  fallibility. 
This  is  not  the  place  to  enter  into  a  discussion  of  the  critical 
question.  Here  I  have  only  to  observe  how  the  question  is 
affected  by  the  view  I  take  that  in  Mark  we  have  the  Petrine 
tradition  completed  into  a  Gospel.  Of  course,  it  is  not  to  be 


IX.]  LAST   TWELVE    VERSES    OF    ST.  MARK.  157 

expected  that  there  should  be  uniformity  of  style  between 
verses  that  belong  to  the  tradition  and  those  which  belong  to 
the  framework  in  which  it  is  set ;  and,  therefore,  arguments  u 
against  the  last  twelve  verses,  drawn  from  a  comparison  ofll 
their  language  with  that  of  other  parts  of  the  Gospel,  at  once' 
lose  their  weight.     On  the  other  hand,  if  we  compare  the  last 
twelve  verses  with  the  first  fifteen,  we  do  find  features  of  re 
semblance,  and  in  particular  I  think  that  it  is  either  on  the 
opening  verses  or  on  the  concluding  ones  the  still  prevalent 
idea  that  Mark's  Gospel  is  an  abridgment  of  the  others  is 
founded.     And  opening  and  conclusion  seem  to  me  to  have 
equal  rights  to  be  regarded  as  part  of  the  framework  in  which 
the  tradition  is  set. 

It  seems  to  me  also  that  the  hand  of  the  writer  of  the  con 
cluding  verses  is  to  be  found  elsewhere  in  the  Gospel.  Three 
times  in  these  concluding  verses  attention  is  called  to  the 
surprising  slowness  of  the  disciples  to  believe  the  evidence 
offered  them  (w.  n,  13,  14).  Now,  you  will  find  that,  the 
thought  is  constantly  present  to  the  mind  of  the  second 
Evangelist,  how  slow  of  heart  were  the  beholders  of  our 
Lord's  miracles ;  how  stubborn  the  unbelief  which  the  evi 
dence  of  these  miracles  was  obliged  to  conquer.  Thus,  in 
the  account  of  the  healing  of  the  man  with  the  withered  hand 
(common  to  the  three  Synoptics),  Mark  alone  relates  (iii.  5) 
that  before  commanding  the  man  to  stretch  forth  his  hand 
our  Lord  looked  round  on  the  bystanders  '  with  anger,  being 
grieved  for  the  hardness  of  their  hearts.'  Again,  in  Mark  vi.  6 
there  is  a  note  special  to  this  Evangelist :  '  Jesus  marvelled 
because  of  their  unbelief.'  And  in  the  history  of  the  tempest 
on  the  lake  of  Gennesaret,  told  both  by  Matthew  and  Mark, 
there  is  a  noticeable  difference  between  the  two  accounts. 
Where  Matthew  (xiv.  33)  tells  of  the  conviction  effected  by 
the  miracle  in  those  who  beheld  it,  Mark  (vi.  52)  has  instead 
an  expression  of  surprise  at  the  stupidity  and  hardness  of 
heart  of  those  who  had  not  sooner  recognized  our  Lord's 
true  character. 

Believing,  then,  the  existing  conclusion  to  have  been  part 
of  the  second  Gospel,  ever  since  it  was  a  Gospel,  I  look  on 
the  marks  of  posteriority  which  it  exhibits  as  affecting  the 


158  THE   SYNOPTIC    GOSPELS.  [iX. 

whole  Gospel ;  and  I  am,  therefore,  disposed  to  believe  that 
Mark's  is  at  once  the  oldest  and  the  youngest  of  the  three 
Synoptics  :  the  oldest  as  giving  most  nearly  the  very  words 
in  which  the  apostolic  traditions  were  delivered  ;  the  youngest 
as  respects  the  date  when  the  independent  traditions  were  set 
in  their  present  framework. 


NOTE 

ON 
THE    CONCLUDING   VERSES   OF   ST.  MARK'S   GOSPEL. 

THE  following  is  a  statement  of  my  reasons  for  thinking  that  in  this  in 
stance  critical  editors  have  preferred — (I.)  later  testimony  to  earlier,  and 
(II.)  a  less  probable  story  to  a  more  probable.  The  question  is  one  that 
stands  by  itself,  so  that  the  conclusions  here  stated  may  be  adopted  by  one 
who  has  accepted  all  Westcott  and  Hort's  other  decisions. 

I.  As  to  the  first  point  there  is  little  room  for  controversy,  (i)  The  dis 
puted  verses  are  expressly  attested  by  Irenseus  in  the  second  century,  and 
very  probably  by  Justin  Martyr,  who  incorporates  some  of  their  language, 
though,  as  usual,  without  express  acknowledgment  of  quotation.  The 
verses  are  found  in  the  Syriac  version  as  early  as  we  have  any  knowledge 
of  it ;  in  the  Curetonian  version  as  well  as  in  the  Peshitto.  Possibly  we 
ought  to  add  to  the  witnesses  for  the  verses — Papias,  Celsus,  and  Hippo- 
lytus.  On  the  other  hand,  the  earliest  witness  against  the  verses  is 
Eusebius,  in  the  fourth  century,  whose  testimony  is  to  the  effect  that  some 
of  the  copies  in  his  time  contained  the  verses,  and  some  did  not ;  but  that 
those  which  omitted  them  were  then  the  more  numerous,  and,  in  his 
opinion,  the  more  trustworthy.  There  is  no  reason  for  doubting  this  tes 
timony  ;  but  Eusebius  stands  strangely  alone  in  it.  It  is  true  that  several 
writers  used  to  be  cited  as  bearing  independent  witness  to  the  same  effect. 
But  all  this  confirmatory  testimony  was  demolished  by  Dean  Burgon  in 
what  seems  to  me  the  most  effective  part  of  his  work  '  On  the  Last  Twelve 
Verses  of  St.  Mark.'  He  shows  that  three  of  the  authorities  cited  reduce 
themselves  to  one.  A  homily  of  uncertain  authorship  having  been  inserted 
among  the  works  of  three  different  writers  ;  each  of  these  writers  was 
separately  cited  as  a  witness.  And  he  shows,  further,  that  all  the  writers 
cited  do  no  more  than  copy,  word  for  word,  what  had  been  said  by  Eusebius ; 
and  in  some  cases  indicate  that  they  were  of  a  different  opinion  themselves. 
Dr.  Hort  replaces,  or  reinforces  these  discredited  witnesses  by  an  argument, 
fx  silentio,  that  the  disputed  verses  were  unknown  to  Cyril  of  Jerusalem, 
who  otherwise  would  not  have  failed  to  use  them  in  his  catechetical  lectures. 


IX.]      THE  CONCLUDING  VERSES  OF  ST.  MARK'S  GOSPEL.        159 

But  the  argument  from  silence  is  always  precarious.  It  is  a  common  expe 
rience  with  everyone  who  makes  a  speech  or  writes  a  book  to  find  after  he 
has  brought  his  work  to  a  conclusion  that  he  has  failed  to  use  some  telling 
argument  which  he  might  have  employed.  Dr.  Hort  owns  that  the  same 
argument  might  be  used  to  prove  that  the  verses  were  unknown  to  Cyril  of 
Alexandria  and  to  Theodoret,  neither  of  whom  could  possibly  be  ignorant 
of  the  verses,  which  in  their  age  were  certainly  in  wide  circulation.  But 
supposing  it  proved  that  the  text  of  St.  Mark  used  by  Cyril  of  Jerusalem 
•did]  not  contain  the  verses,  it  only  results  that  the  recension  approved  by 
the  great  Palestinian  critic,  Eusebius,  found  favour  in  Palestine  for  a  few 
years  after  his  death.  We  still  fail  to  find  any  distinct  witness  against  the 
verses  who,  we  can  be  sure,  is  independent  of  Eusebius. 

It  is  more  to  the  point,  that  Dr.  Hort  contends  by  a  similar  argument 
from  silence  that  neither  Tertullian  nor  Cyprian  knew  the  disputed  verses. 
In  order  to  maintain  this  thesis,  as  far  as  Cyprian  is  concerned,  Dr.  Hort 
is  forced  to  contend  that  the  quotation  by  a  bishop  at  one  of  Cyprian's 
councils,  of  words  of  our  Lord,  '  In  my  name,  lay  on  hands,  cast  out  devils,' 
implies  no  knowledge  of  Mark  xvi.  17,  18!  All  extant  copies  of  the  old 
Latin,  with  but  one  exception,  recognize  the  disputed  verses  ;  but  that 
one  has  so  many  points  of  agreement  with  the  quotations  of  Cyprian  that 
it  seems  probable  that  the  translation  first  in  use  in  Africa  was  made  from 
a  copy  of  the  shorter  version.  On  the  other  hand,  the  disputed  verses 
were  used  in  the  West  by  Irenseus,  and  were  in  the  Curetonian  version, 
which  has  many  affinities  with  the  old  Latin.  Indeed  we  are  led  to 
suspect  that  Eusebius  must  have  been  guilty  of  some  exaggeration  in  his 
account  of  the  general  absence  of  the  verses  from  MSS.  of  his  day.  The 
presence  of  the  verses  in  all  later  MSS.,  and  the  testimony  of  writers  who 
lived  within  a  century  of  Eusebius,  prove  that  the  scribes  of  the  generation 
next  to  him  found  copies  containing  the  verses,  and  that,  notwithstand 
ing  his  great  authority,  they  gave  them  the  preference.  And,  if  the  argu 
ment  from  silence  is  worth  anything,  the  fact  deserves  attention,  that  we 
have  no  evidence  that  any  writer  anterior  to  Eusebius  remarked  that  there 
was  anything  abrupt  in  the  conclusion  of  St.  Mark's  Gospel,  or  that  it  gave 
no  testimony  to  our  Lord's  Resurrection. 

(2)  '  But  the  two  great  uncials  B  and  «  agree  in  rejecting  the  verses,  and 
though  these  be  but  fourth-century  MSS.,  yet  as  they  were  made  from 
different  archetypes,  the  common  parent  of  these  archetypes,  presumably 
the  common  source  of  readings  in  which  they  agree,  is  likely  to  have  been 
as  old  as  the  second  century.'  Let  it  be  granted  that  this  inference  holds 
good  in  the  case  of  ordinary  agreements  between  B  and  «  ;  but  the  present 
case  is  exceptional.  The  MSS.  are  here  not  independent,  the  conclusion 
of  St.  Mark  being  transcribed  in  both  by  the  same  hand.  This  was  pointed 
out  by  Tischendorf ;  but  it  is  to  be  observed  that  his  opinion  does  not 
merely  rest  on  his  general  impression  of  the  character  of  the  handwriting, 
concerning  which  only  an  expert  like  himself  would  be  competent  to 
judge.  He  gives  a  multitude  of  conspiring  proofs,  which  can  be  verified 


l6o       THE  CONCLUDING  VERSES  OF  ST.  MARK'S  GOSPEL.       [iX. 

by  anyone  who  refers  to  the  published  facsimile  of  the  Sinaitic  MS. 
The  leaf  containing  the  conclusion  of  St.  Mark  is  one  of  six  leaves 
which  differ  from  the  work  of  the  Sinaitic  New  Testament  scribe  and 
agree  with  that  of  the  Vatican  in  a  number  of  peculiarities  :  in  the  shape 
of  certain  letters,  for  instance  E  ;  in  the  mode  of  filling  up  vacant  space  at 
the  end  of  a  line  ;  in  the  punctuation ;  in  the  manner  of  referring  to  an 
insertion  in  the  margin ;  in  the  mode  of  marking  the  end  of  a  book,  includ 
ing  what  Tischendorf  calls  arabesques,  or  ornamented  finials,  those  used  in 
the  Sinaitic  being  quite  unlike  those  used  in  the  Vatican,  except  in  the 
leaves  now  under  consideration.  Further,  in  these  leaves  the  words  fodpuiros, 
v!6s,  ovpav6s,  are  written  at  full  length,  as  in  the  Vatican,  not  abbreviated, 
as  elsewhere  in  the  Sinaitic.  Again,  these  leaves  agree  with  the  Vatican 
against  the  Sinaitic  as  to  certain  points  of  orthography.  For  instance, 
Pilate's  name  is  spelt  with  t  in  the  Sinaitic,  with  et  in  these  leaves  and  in 
the  Vatican ;  'Iwdvv-rjs  is  spelt  with  one  v  by  the  Vatican  scribe,  with  two 
by  the  Sinaitic.  Such  an  accumulation  of  indications  does  not  come  short 
of  a  demonstration  ;  and,  accordingly,  Tischendorf 's  conclusion  is  accepted 
by  Dr.  Hort,  who  says  (p.  213) :  'The  fact  appears  to  be  sufficiently  es 
tablished  by  concurrent  peculiarities  in  the  form  of  one  letter,  punctuation, 
avoidance  of  contractions,  and  some  points  of  orthography.  As  the  six 
leaves  are  found  on  computation  to  form  three  pairs  of  conjugate  leaves, 
holding  different  places  in  three  distant  quires,  it  seems  probable  that  they 
are  new  or  clean  copies  of  corresponding  leaves  which  had  been  executed 
by  the  scribe  who  wrote  the  rest  of  the  New  Testament,  but  had  been  so 
disfigured  either  by  an  unusual  number  of  clerical  errors,  or  from  some 
unknown  cause,  that  they  appeared  unworthy  to  be  retained,  and  were 
therefore  cancelled  and  transcribed '  by  the  "corrector."'  Tischendorf 's 
view,  that  these  leaves  were  transcribed  by  the  '  corrector '  is  confirmed 
by  the  fact  that  these  leaves  themselves  contain  scarcely  any  corrections. 
Not  that  they  do  not  require  them.  In  the  first  verse  of  Mark  xvi.,  for 
instance,  there  is  a  very  gross  blunder  which  could  not  have  failed  to  be 
discovered  if  the  leaf  had  been  read  over ;  but  it  is  intelligible  that  the 
'corrector,'  whose  duty  it  was  to  read  over  the  work  of  other  scribes, 
thought  it  unnecessary  to  read  over  his  own. 

But  why  was  this  leaf  cancelled  ?  On  inspection  of  the  page,  two 
phenomena  present  themselves,  which  go  far  to  supply  the  answer.  First, 
on  looking  at  the  column  containing  the  conclusion  of  St.  Mark,  and  at 
the  next  column,  containing  the  beginning  of  St.  Luke,  it  is  apparent  that 
the  former  is  written  far  more  widely  than  the  latter.  There  are,  in  fact 
only  560  letters  in  the  former  column,  678  in  the  latter.  This  suggests  that 
the  page  as  originally  written  must  have  contained  something  of  consider 
able  length  which  was  omitted  in  the  substituted  copy.  Unless  some  pre 
caution  were  taken  an  omission  of  the  kind  would  leave  a  telltale  blank. 
In  fact,  if  the  concluding  column  of  St.  Mark  had  been  written  in  the 
same  manner  as  elsewhere,  there  would  have  been  a  whole  column  blank. 
But  by  spreading  out  his  writing  the  scribe  was  enabled  to  carry  over  37 


IX.]       THE  CONCLUDING  VERSES  OF  ST.  MARK'S  GOSPEL.        l6l 

letters  to  a  new  column,  the  rest  of  which  could  be  left  blank  without 
attracting  notice,  as  it  was  the  conclusion  of  a  Gospel.  The  second  pheno 
menon  is  that  the  Gospel  ends  in  the  middle  of  a  line,  and  the  whole  of 
the  rest  of  the  line  is  filled  up  with  ornament,  while,  underneath,  the 
arabesque  is  prolonged  horizontally,  so  as  to  form  an  ornamented  line 
reaching  all  across  the  column.  This  filling  up  the  last  line  occurs  nowhere 
else  in  the  Sinaitic  (though  the  same  scribe  has  written  the  conclusion  of 
three  other  books),  nor  in  the  Vatican  New  Testament.  It  occurs  three 
or  four  times  in  the  Vatican  Old  Testament,  but  the  prolongation  of  the 
arabesque  has  no  parallel  in  either  MS.  We  see  that  the  scribe  who 
recopied  the  leaf  betrays  that  he  had  his  mind  full  of  the  thought  that  the 
Gospel  must  be  made  to  end  with  ftyoftovvro  yap,  and  took  pains  that  no 
one  should  add  more.  I  do  not  think  these  two  phenomena  can  be 
reasonably  explained  in  any  other  way  than  that  the  leaf,  as  originally 
copied,  had  contained  the  disputed  verses  ;  and  that  the  corrector,  regard 
ing  these  as  not  a  genuine  part  of  the  Gospel,  cancelled  the  leaf,  recopying 
it  in  such  a  way  as  to  cover  the  gap  left  by  the  erasure.  It  follows  that 
the  archetype  of  the  Sinaitic  MS.  had  contained  the  disputed  verses.  But 
what  about  the  archetype  of  the  Vatican?  In  that  manuscript  there 
actually  is  a  column  left  blank  following  the  end  of  St.  Mark,  this  being 
the  only  blank  column  in  the  whole  MS.  All  critics  agree  that  the  blank 
column  indicates  that  the  scribe  was  cognizant  of  something  following 
fQofiovvTo  ydp  which  he  did  not  choose  to  copy.  But  surely  before  he 
began  St.  Luke  he  would  make  up  his  mind  whether  or  not  the  additional 
verses  deserved  a  place  in  his  text.  If  he  decided  against  them  he  would 
leave  no  blank,  but  begin  St.  Luke  in  the  next  column.  But  what  we  have 
seen  in  the  case  of  the  Sinaitic  suggests  the  hypothesis  that  the  Vatican 
also  as  first  copied  had  contained  the  disputed  verses,  and  that  on  the  leaf 
being  cancelled,  the  gap  left  by  the  omission  was  bigger  than  spreading 
out  the  letters  would  cover.  Thus  both  MSS.,  when  cross-examined,  give 
evidence,  not  against,  but  for  the  disputed  verses,  and  afford  us  reason  to 
believe  that  in  this  place  these  MSS.  do  not  represent  the  reading  of  their 
archetypes,  but  the  critical  views  of  the  corrector  under  whose  hand  both 
passed  ;  and  as  they  were  both  copied  at  a  time  when  the  authority  of 
Eusebius  as  a  biblical  critic  was  predominant,  and  possibly  even  under  the 
superintendence  of  Eusebius  himself  (for  Canon  Cook  thinks  that  these 
two  were  part  of  the  50  MSS.  which  Constantine  commissioned  Eusebius 
to  have  copied  for  the  use  of  his  new  capital),  we  still  fail  to  get  distinctly 
pre-Eusebian  testimony  against  the  verses. 

II.  '  Supposing  that  we  cannot  produce  against  the  verses  any  witness 
earlier  than  Eusebius,  still  Eusebius  in  the  fourth  century  used  a  purer  text 
than  Irenseus  in  the  second,  and,  therefore,  his  testimony  deserves  the  more 
credit.'  Again,  I  raise  no  question  as  to  general  principles  of  criticism, 
nor  shall  1  inquire  whether  in  this  case  Eusebius  was  not  liable  to  be  unduly 
influenced  by  harmonistic  considerations ;  but  if  we  accept  the  fourth- 
century  witness  as  on  the  whole  the  more  trustworthy,  it  remains  to  be 

M 


I  62       THE  CONCLUDING  VERSES  OF  ST.  MARK'S  GOSPEL.       [iX. 

considered  whether  we  are  to  prefer  a  credible  witness  telling  an  in 
credible  story  to  a  less  trustworthy  witness  telling  a  highly  probable 
one. 

The  rejection  of  the  verses  absolutely  forces  on  us  the  alternative  either 
that  the  conclusion  which  St.  Mark  originally  wrote  to  his  Gospel  was  lost 
without  leaving  a  trace  of  its  existence,  or  else  that  the  second  Gospel 
never  proceeded  beyond  verse  8.  The  probability  that  one  or  other  of 
these  two  things  is  true  is  the  exact  measure  of  the  probability  that  the 
Eusebian  form  of  text  is  correct. 

(1)  "We  may  fairly  dismiss  as  incredible  the  supposition  that  the  con 
clusion  which  St.  Mark   originally  wrote  to  his  Gospel  unaccountably 
disappeared  without  leaving  a  trace  behind,  and  was  almost  universally 
replaced  by  a  different  conclusion.      It  has  been  suggested  that  the  last 
leaf  of  the  original  MS.  became  detached,  and  perished  ;  and  it  is  true  that 
the  loss  of  a  leaf  is  an  accident  liable  to  happen  to  a  MS.     Such  a  hypothesis 
explains  very  well  the  partial  circulation  of  defective  copies  of  a  work. 
Suppose,  for  instance,  that  a  very  old  copy  of  St.  Mark's  Gospel,  wanting 
the  last  leaf,  was  brought,  let  us  say,  to  Egypt.      Transcripts  made  from 
that  venerable  copy  would  want  the  concluding  verses ;  or  if  they  were 
added  from   some   other  authority,  indications  might    appear   that  the 
addition  had  been  made  only   after  the  Gospel  had  been  supposed  to 
terminate.     In  this  way  might  originate  a  local  circulation  of  a  defective 
family  of  MSS.     But  the  total  loss  of  the  original  conclusion  could  not  take 
place  in  this  way,  unless  the  first  copy  had  been  kept  till  it  dropped  to. 
pieces  with  age  before  anyone  made  a  transcript  of  it,  so  that  a  leaf  once 
lost  was  lost  for  ever. 

(2)  It  has  been  imagined  that  the  Gospel  never  had  a  formal  conclusion : 
but  this  also  I  find  myself  unable  to  believe.      Long  before  any  Gospel 
was  written,   the  belief  in  the  Resurrection  of  our  Lord  had  become 
universal  among  Christians,  and  this  doctrine  had  become  the  main  topic 
of  every  Christian  preacher.     A  history  of  our  Lord,  in  which  this  cardinal 
point  was  left  unmentioned,  may  be  pronounced  inconceivable.     And  if 
there  were  no  doctrinal  objection,  there  would  be  the  literary  one — that 
no  Greek  writer  would  give  his  work  so  abrupt  and  ill-omened  a  termination 
as  styoftovVTO  yap. 

Two  explanations  of  the  absence  of  a  suitable  conclusion  have  been 
offered.  One  is  that  the  Evangelist  died  before  bringing  his  work  to  a 
conclusion.  But  even  in  the  supposed  case,  that  St.  Mark,  after  writing 
verse  8,  had  a  fit  of  apoplexy,  the  disciple  who  gave  his  work  to  the  world 
would  surely  have  added  a  fitting  termination.  The  other  is  that  Mark 
copied  a  previous  document,  to  which  he  was  too  conscientious  to  make 
any  addition  of  his  own.  Then  our  difficulties  are  simply  transferred  from 
St.  Mark  to  the  writer  of  that  previous  document.  But,  not  to  press  this 
point,  we  must  examine  whether  internal  evidence  supports  the  theory 
that  Mark  acted  the  part  of  a  simple  copyist,  who  did  not  attempt  to  set 
the  previous  tradition  in  any  framework  of  his  own  ;  and  that,  consequently 


IX.]       THE  CONCLUDING  VERSES  OF  ST.  MARK'S  GOSPEL.        163 

the  second  Gospel,  as  it  stands  now,  was  the  source  used  by  Matthew  and 
Luke  in  the  composition  of  their  Gospels.  I  do  not  believe  this  to  be 
true;  and  so  I  find  no  explanation  to  make  it  conceivable  that  Mark's 
Gospel  could  have  finished  with  tyofiovvro  ydp. 

On  the  other  hand,  the  opinion  that  the  concluding  verses,  just  as  much 
as  the  opening  ones,  belong  to  the  original  framework  of  the  Gospel  has 
no  internal  difficulties  whatever  to  encounter.  The  twelve  verses  have 
such  marks  of  antiquity  that  Dr.  Tregelles,  who  refused  to  believe  them 
to  have  been  written  by  St.  Mark,  still  regarded  them  as  having  'a  full  I 
claim  to  be  received  as  an  authentic  part  of  the  second  Gospel.'  In  fact, 
we  have  in  the  short  termination  of  Codex  L,  a  specimen  of  the  vague 
generalities  with  which  a  later  editor,  who  really  knew  no  more  than  was 
contained  in  our  Gospels,  might  attempt  to  supply  a  deficiency  in  the 
narrative.  The  twelve  verses,  on  the  contrary,  are  clearly  the  work  of  one 
who  wrote  at  so  early  a  date  that  he  could  believe  himself  able  to  add 
genuine  apostolic  traditions  to  those  already  recorded.  If  he  asserts  that 
Jesus  '  was  received  up  into  heaven  and  sat  on  the  right  hand  of  God,'  he 
only  gives  expression  to  what  was  the  universal  belief  of  Christians  at  as 
early  a  period  as  anyone  believes  the  second  Gospel  to  have  been  written 
(see  Rom.  viii.  34  ;  Eph.  i.  20  ;  Col.  iii.  I  ;  I  Peter  iii.  22  ;  Heb.  i.  3  ;  viii. 
i ;  x.  12;  xii.  2).  This  belief  was  embodied  in  the  earliest  Christian 
Creeds,  especially  in  that  of  the  Church  of  'Rome,  with  which  probable 
tradition  connects  the  composition  of  St.  Mark's  Gospel.  Further,  the 
twelve  verses  were  written  at  a  time  when  the  Church  still  believed  herself 
in  possession  of  miraculous  powers.  Later,  a  stumbling-block  was  found 
in  the  signs  which  it  was  said  (verse  17)  should  '  follow  them  that  believe.' 
The  heathen  objector,  with  whom  Macarius  Magnes*  had  to  deal,  asked 
if  any  Christians  of  his  day  really  did  believe.  Would  the  strongest 
believer  of  them  all  test  the  matter  by  drinking  a  cup  of  poison  ?  The 
objection  may  have  been  as  old  as  Porphyry,  and  may  have  been  one  of  the 
reasons  why  Eusebius  was  willing  to  part  with  these  verses.  We  must, 
therefore,  ascribe  their  authorship  to  one  who  lived  in  the  very  first  age 
of  the  Church.  And  why  not  to  St.  Mark  ? 

Thus,  while  the  Eusebian  recension  of  St.  Mark  presents  intrinsic  diffi 
culties  of  the  most  formidable  character,  that  form  of  text  which  has  the 
advantage  of  attestation  earlier  by  a  century  and  a -half  contains  nothing 
inconsistent  with  the  date  claimed  for  it.  In  spite,  then,  of  the  eminence 
of  the  critics  who  reject  the  twelve  verses,  I  cannot  help  looking  at  them 

*  The  author  of  a  book  called  Apocritica,  written  about  A.D.  400,  and 
containing  heathen  objections  against  Christianity,  with  answers  to  them. 
In  answering  an  objection  founded  on  the  disputed  verses,  Macarius  shows 
no  suspicion  that  it  was  open  to  him  to  cast  any  doubt  on  their  genuine 
ness.  Nothing  is  known  with  certainty  about  this  Macarius,  and  indeed 
his  book  had  been  known  only  by  a  few  short  extracts,  until  a  considerable 
portion  of  it,  which  had  been  recovered  at  Athens,  was  published  in  Paris 
in  1876. 

M  2 


1 64       THE  CONCLUDING  VERSES  OF  ST.  MARK'S  GOSPEL.       [iX. 

as  having  been  from  the  first  an  integral  part  of  the  second  Gospel ;  and  I 
regard  the  discussion  of  them  as  belonging  not  so  much  to  the  criticism  of 
the  Text  as  to  the  subject  of  the  present  lecture,  the  history  of  the  genesis 
of  the  Synoptic  Gospels.* 

*  It  seems  to  me  that  textual  critics  are  not  entitled  to  feel  absolute 
confidence  in  their  results,  if  they  venture  within  range  of  the  obscurity 
that  hangs  over  the  history  of  the  first  publication  of  the  Gospels.  Such 
a  task  as  Bentley  and  Lachmann  proposed  to  themselves,  viz.  to  recover  a 
good  fourth-century  text — was  perfectly  feasible,  and  has,  in  fact,  been 
accomplished  by  Westcott  and  Hort  with  triumphant  success.  I  suppose 
that  if  a  MS.  containing  their  text  could  have  been  put  into  the  hands  of 
Eusebius,  he  would  have  found  only  one  thing  in  it  which  would  have  been 
quite  strange  to  him,  namely,  the  short  conclusion  on  the  last  page  of  St. 
Mark,  and  that  he  would  have  pronounced  the  MS.  to  be  an  extremely 
good  and  accurate  one.  But  these  editors  aim  at  nothing  less  than  going 
back  to  the  original  documents ;  and,  in  order  to  do  this,  it  is  in  some 
cases  necessary  to  choose  between  two  forms  of  text,  each  of  which  is 
attested  by  authorities  older  than  any  extant  MS.  Now,  a  choice  which 
must  be  made  on  subjective  grounds  only  cannot  be  made  with  the  same 
confidence  as  when  there  is  on  either  side  a  clear  preponderance  of  his 
torical  testimony.  And,  further,  there  is  the  possibility  that  the  Evangelist 
might  have  himself  published  a  second  edition  of  his  Gospel,  so  that 
two  forms  of  text  might  both  be  entitled  to  claim  his  authority. 


X. 


THE  ORIGINAL  LANGUAGE  OF  ST.  MATTHEW. 


THE   HEBREW   GOSPEL. 

IN  this  lecture  I  propose  to  discuss  what  amount  of 
credence  is  due  to  the  statement  of  Papias  that  St. 
Matthew  wrote  his  Gospel  in  Hebrew — that  is,  in  the  later 
form  of  the  language  which  was  popularly  spoken  in  Palestine 
in  our  Lord's  time.  The  question  is  a  very  difficult  one,  on 
account  of  the  conflict  between  external  and  internal  evidence. 
The  difficulty  I  speak  of  lies  in  the  determination  of  the  exact 
nature  of  the  relationship  between  our  Greek  Gospel  and  its 
possible  Aramaic  predecessors.  We  need  have  no  difficulty 
in  believing  that,  before  our  Gospels,  there  had  been  written 
records  of  discourses  of  our  Lord  and  of  incidents  in  His  life; 
that  one  or  more  of  these  may  have  been  in  Aramaic,  and  may 
have  been  used  by  our  Evangelists.  But  when  all  this  has 
been  granted,  it  still  remains  a  subject  for  inquiry  whether 
any  of  these  preceding  documents  had  assumed  the  form  of 
a  complete  Gospel,  and  whether  our  Greek  St.  Matthew  is  to 
be  regarded  as  a  mere  translation  of  it,  or  as  an  independent 
work. 

It  is  certain  that  in  very  early  times  Hebrew-speaking 
Christians  had  in  use  Gospels  in  their  own  language :  and 
these  were  quite  different  in  character  from  the  Apocryphal 
Gospels,  of  which  I  mean  to  speak  in  the  next  lecture.  It 
was  a  necessity  for  Greek  Apocryphal  Gospels  to  be  different 
from  the  Canonical ;  for  unless  they  had  something  new  to 
tell,  why  should  they  be  written  ?  They  were  either  framed 


1 66  THE    ORIGINAL    LANGUAGE   OF   ST.  MATTHEW.  [x. 

in  the  interests  of  some  heresy,  the  doctrines  of  which  were 
to  obtain  support  from  sayings  put  into  the  mouth  of  our 
Lord  or  His  Apostles ;  or  else  they  were  simply  intended  to 
satisfy  the  curiosity  of  Christians  on  some  points  on  which 
the  earlier  Evangelists  had  said  nothing.     In  either  case  it 
was  the  very  essence  of  these  Gospels  to  tell  something  diffe 
rent  from  the  Gospels  we  have.     It  was  quite  otherwise  with 
the  Hebrew  Gospels.    They  were  intended  to  do  the  very  same 
thing  for  the  benefit  of  the  disciples  who  spoke  Hebrew  that 
the  Greek  Gospels  were  to  do  for  those  who  could  speak  Greek. 
There  was  no  necessity  that  either  class  of  disciples  should 
be  taught  by  means  of  a  translation  from  a  different  language. 
There  were,  among  those  who  had  personal  knowledge  of  the 
facts  of  the  Gospel  history,  men  competent  to  tell  the  story 
in  either  tongue.      We  might,  therefore,  reasonably  expect 
that  there  would  be  original  Gospels  in  the  two  languages, 
proceeding  on  the  same  lines,  the  same  story  being  told  in 
both,  and  possibly  by  the  same  men ;  and  yet,  though  in  sub 
stantial,  not  in  absolute,  agreement  with  each  other.     There 
would  be  no  a  priori  reason  why  an  independent  Hebrew 
Gospel  might  not  differ  as  much  from  our  Synoptics,  as  one 
of  these  does  from  another ;  and  since  each  of  the  Synoptics 
contains  some  things  not  told  by  the  rest,  so,  possibly,  might 
an  independent  Hebrew  Gospel  record  some  sayings  or  acts 
of  our  Lord  other  than  those  contained  in  the  Greek  Gospels. 
It  is  reasonable  to  believe  that  if  there  were  any  material 
difference   in   the   way  of  telling  the  history,  the   Hebrew 
Gospel  would  be  translated  into  Greek;  but  if  the  resemblance 
between  the  Hebrew  Gospel  and  one  of  the  Greek  ones  was 
in  the  main  very  close,  it  would  not  be  worth  while  to  make 
a  translation  of  the  whole  Gospel,  and  anything  special  which 
it  contained  might  pass  into  Greek  independently.    I  have  par 
ticularly  in  my  mind  the  story  of  the  woman  taken  in  adultery. 
Eusebius,  who  probably  did  not  read  that  story  in  his  copy  of 
the  Gospel    according  to  St.  John,  informs  us  (iii.  39)  that 
Papias  had  related  a  story  of  a  woman  accused  of  many  sins 
before  our  Lord,  and  that  the  same  story  was  contained  in 
the  Gospel  according  to  the   Hebrews.      Well,   I  have  no 
difficulty   in   admitting    it   to   be   possible   that   a   perfectly 


X.]  EXTERNAL    EVIDENCE    FOR    HEBREW   ORIGINAL.          167 

authentic  anecdote  of  our  Lord  might  have  been  related  in 
the  Hebrew  Gospel  alone,  that  this  might  be  translated  into 
Greek,  and  find  its  way,  first  into  the  margin,  ultimately  into 
the  text,  of  one  of  our  Greek  Gospels.  And  it  seems  to  me 
by  no  means  unlikely  that  this  may  afford  the  true  explanation 
of  some  more  trifling  insertions  found  in  Western  MSS.,  which 
the  severity  of  modern  criticism  rejects  as  not  entitled  to  a 
place  in  the  Greek  text.  This  also  may  give  the  explanation 
of  an  interpolation  in  the  zoth  Matthew,  found  in  some  early 
authorities,  containing  instructions  substantially  the  same  as 
those  given  in  i4th  Luke,  against  taking  the  highest  place  at 
a  feast. 

I  have  said  enough  to  show  that  there  is  no  antecedent 
improbability,  such  as  to  throw  any  difficulty  in  the  way  of 
our  accepting  a  statement  that  an  Apostle  wrote  a  Gospel  in 
Hebrew,  and  that  this  Gospel  was  afterwards  translated  into 
Greek.  Now,  that  our  first  Gospel  actually  is  such  a  trans 
lation  from  one  written  in  Hebrew  by  St.  Matthew  is  testified 
by  an  overwhelming  mass  of  Patristic  evidence,  which  has 
been  accepted  as  conclusive  by  a  number  of  the  most  eminent 
modern  critics.  In  the  first  rank  of  these  witnesses  must  be 
reckoned  Papias,  whom  I  have  already  quoted.  I  do  not 
know  whether  Irenseus  can  be  counted  an  independent  wit 
ness:  for  he  knew  and  valued  the  work  of  Papias,  and  may 
have  thence  drawn  his  information;  but  as  he  gives  a  note  of 
time  not  found  in  the  extract  quoted  by  Eusebius,  he  may 
possibly  have  derived  a  tradition  from  some  other  source. 
What  Irenaeus  says  (iii.  i)  is,  that  'Matthew,  among  the 
Hebrews,  published  a  Gospel  in  their  own  dialect  when  Peter 
and  Paul  were  preaching  in  Rome  and  founding  the  Church.' 
Again,  Eusebius  (v.  10)  tells  a  story  of  Pantaenus,  who,  about 
the  beginning  of  the  last  quarter  of  the  second  century,  was 
the  head  of  the  Catechetical  School  of  Alexandria,  where  he 
accordingly  was  the  teacher  of  Clement  of  Alexandria.  The 
tradition,  which  Eusebius  reports  with  an  '  it  is  said,'  is,  that 
Pantaenus  went  to  preach  to  the  Indians,  and  that  he  found 
the  Gospel  of  Matthew  had  got  there  before  him :  for  that  the 
Apostle  Bartholomew  had  preached  to  the  Indians,  and  had 
left  them  St.  Matthew's  Gospel  written  in  Hebrew  letters, 


1 68  THE    ORIGINAL   LANGUAGE    OF   ST.  MATTHEW.  [x. 

which  they  had  preserved  to  the  time  of  Pantsenus's  visit  and 
later.  The  external  evidence  for  this  tradition,  it  will  be 
seen,  is  weak;  and  it  certainly  has  no  internal  probability  to 
recommend  it.  A  Greek  book  would  have  had  a  better 
chance  of  being  understood  in  India  (no  matter  what  that 
word  means)  than  an  Aramaic  one. 

What  these  early  fathers  asserted,  those  who  came  after 
them  naturally  echoed,  so  that  the  testimony  of  the  majority 
of  later  writers  cannot  be  regarded  as  adding  much  to  the 
weight  of  these  early  witnesses  :  especially  as  very  few  of 
them  knew  Hebrew,  or  could  say  that  they  themselves  had 
seen  the  Hebrew  original  of  St.  Matthew.  We  have,  how 
ever,  in  St.  Jerome  a  witness  who  seems  above  all  suspicion. 
He  says  that  Matthew  wrote  his  Gospel  in  Hebrew  words- 
and  letters  for  the  sake  of  those  of  the  circumcision  who 
believed  in  Christ,  and  that  it  is  uncertain  who  translated  it 
into  Greek.  He  adds  that  a  copy  of  the  original  Hebrew  was 
then  still  preserved  in  the  library  at  Caesarea,  founded  by  the 
martyr  Pamphilus,  and  that  he  himself  had  transcribed  the 
Hebrew  Gospel  with  the  leave  of  the  Nazaraeans  who  lived  at 
Beroea  in  Syria  [Aleppo],  and  who  used  that  Gospel.*  We 
have  the  further  testimony  of  Epiphanius,f  who  was  well 
acquainted  with  Eastern  languages.  He  mentions  the  same 
sect  of  the  Nazarenes  to  which  Jerome  refers,  for  he  describes 
Beroea  as  one  of  the  places  where  they  most  flourished  ;  and 
he  says  that  they  had  the  Gospel  of  St.  Matthew  complete, 
written  in  Hebrew,  only  he  is  not  sure  whether  they  did  not 

*  De  Viris  illustr.,  3.  Jerome  resided  in  the  desert  east  of  Syria,  374- 
379,  and  it  seems  to  have  been  at  this  period  that  he  made  acquaintance 
with  the  Hebrew  St.  Matthew.  The  work  from  which  the  citation  is 
taken  was  published  in  392. 

t  Epiphanius,  bishop  of  Salamis  in  Cyprus,  published  his  great  work  on 
Heresies  in  377.  "We  have  often  reason  to  remark  that  the  literary  work 
of  the  Fathers  falls  short  of  the  modern  standard  of  accuracy ;  but  there  is 
none  who  is  more  apt  than  Epiphanius  to  make  blunders  through  careless 
ness,  want  of  critical  discrimination,  and,  through  a  habit  not  unknown  at 
the  present  day,  of  stating  what  he  guessed  might  be  true,  as  if  he  had 
ascertained  it  to  be  time.  On  this  account  his  unsupported  testimony  can 
only  be  used  with  great  caution.  But  he  is  well  entitled  to  be  heard  on 
the  present  question,  since  Syriac  was  his  native  language,  and  he  appears 
to  have  been  well  acquainted  with  Hebrew,  besides  knowing  Egyptian, 
Greek,  and  Latin,  whence  he  was  called 


X.]  INTERNAL    EVIDENCE    FOR    GREEK   ORIGIN.  1 69 

take  away  the  genealogy  from  the  beginning  (Haer.  29). 
This  confession  of  ignorance  gives  us  reason  to  infer  that 
he  does  not  speak  of  this  Gospel  from  personal  knowledge. 
In  calling  their  version  complete  (irXypeo-TaTov)  he  meant  to 
contrast  it  with  that  used  by  another  Jewish  sect  whom  he 
calls  the  Ebionites,  and  which  he  describes  in  his  next 
section.  They  also  had  a  Hebrew  Gospel  which  they  called 
that  according  to  St.  Matthew :  and  this  Epiphanius  knew, 
and  gives  several  extracts  from  it.  He  tells  us  that  it  was 
not  perfect,  but  corrupted  and  mutilated  (ov\  oty  Se 
TrX^pecrrara),  aAAa  vei/o^ev/xevw  /cat  ^/cpwnypiaoy/.ej/a)). 

In  point  of  external  evidence,  then,  the  proof  of  the 
Hebrew  original  of  St.  Matthew's  Gospel  seems  as  complete 
as  could  be  desired.  Yet  there  are  two  considerations  to  be 
attended  to  before  we  accept  all  this  testimony  as  absolutely 
conclusive. 

One  is,  that  internal  evidence  leads  us  to  regard  our 
present  Matthew  as  an  original  work,  not  a  translation.  In 
the  first  place,  we  have  translations  of  Hebrew  words  :  '  They 
shall  call  his  name  Emmanuel,  which  being  interpreted  is, 
God  with  us'  (i.  23).  'A  place  called  Golgotha,  that  is  to- 
say,  a  place  of  a  skull'  (xxvii.  33);  'Eli,  Eli,  lama  sabach- 
thani,  that  is  to  say,  My  God,  my  God,  why  hast  thou  forsaken 
me?'  (xxvii.  46).  It  is  evident  these  explanations  could  not 
have  been  in  the  Hebrew  original,  and  that  they  must  have 
been  introduced  by  the  translator,  if  there  was  one.  Next, 
there  are  explanations  which  show  a  regard  to  the  case  of 
readers  unacquainted  with  the  customs  of  Palestine  at  the 
time  in  question  :  '  The  same  day  came  to  him  the  Sadducees, 
which  say  that  there  is  no  resurrection'  (xxii.  23);  'Now  at 
that  feast  the  governor  was  wont  to  release  unto  the  people  a 
prisoner  whom  they  would '  (xxvii.  15) ;  '  That  field  was  called 
the  field  of  blood  unto  this  day'  (xxvii.  8);  'This  saying  is 
commonly  reported  among  the  Jews  until  this  day '  (xxviii.  15). 
These  explanations  would  not  have  been  necessary  for  one 
writing  in  Hebrew  to  the  Jews  of  Palestine,  but  are  quite 
suitable  in  a  work  written  in  Greek,  and  expected  to  pass 
outside  the  limits  of  the  Holy  Land.  I  do  not  venture  to  lay 
much  stress  on  instances  of  paronomasia,  to  which  attention 


1  70     THE  ORIGINAL  LANGUAGE  OF  ST.  MATTHEW.      [x. 


has  been  called,  such  as  d^avi^ova-iv  OTTW?  <£av6kriv  (vi.  16); 
a/ctos  (xxi.  41);  nor  on  expressions  such  as  PO.TTO- 
/,  TroXvAoyia.  Possibly  instances  of  this  kind  are  not 
more  than  might  be  unconsciously  introduced  by  a  translator. 
But  the  investigation  in  which  we  engaged  in  the  last  lecture 
goes  very  near  to  determine  the  present  question.  For 
example,  I  regard  it  as  almost  certain  that  our  first  Gospel 
did  not  copy  the  third,  nor  the  third  the  first,  but  that  both 
drew  from  a  common  source.  And  I  have  stated  my  opinion 
that  the  facts  are  not  explained  by  the  supposition  that  that 
source  was  Aramaic  :  being  led  to  this  conclusion  by  an 
examination  of  the  coincidences  of  language  in  the  Greek  of 
the  Gospels,  and  in  particular  by  a  study  of  the  manner  in 
which  the  first  Gospel  cites  the  Old  Testament.  Now,  if  we 
come  to  the  conclusion  that  the  first  Gospel,  such  as  we  have 
it,  shows  traces  of  the  use  of  a  Greek  source,  the  only  way  in 
which  it  is  possible  to  maintain  the  Hebrew  original  is  by 
adding  the  hypothesis  that  the  translator  of  the  Gospel  into 
Greek  was  acquainted  with  the  source  in  question,  and  used 
it  to  guide  him  in  his  work.  I  will  not  delay  now  to  speak  of 
the  difficulties  of  this  hypothesis,  as  I  shall  presently  give 
reasons  for  thinking  it  needless  to  have  recourse  to  it.  Nor 
will  I  dwell  on  certain  minute  marks  of  originality  in  our 
present  first  Gospel.  Some  of  them,  indeed,  can  better  be 
felt  than  described  ;  but  certainly  the  impression  on  any 
reader  of  Matthew  and  Luke  is,  that  one  is  as  much  an  original 
as  the  other. 

I  pass  to  the  second  consideration,  namely,  that  none  of 
the  Fathers  show  acquaintance  with  any  Greek  text  of  the 
first  Gospel  other  than  that  we  have.  If  a  Hebrew  Gospel 
by  St.  Matthew  had  been  recognized  as  a  primary  source  of 
information  concerning  our  Lord's  history,  we  might  expect 
that  more  persons  than  one  would  have  been  anxious  to 
translate  it  into  Greek.  Actually  there  is  no  trace  of  any 
Greek  text  but  one,  and  that  seems  to  have  been  established 
in  exclusive  possession  in  the  days  of  our  earliest  witness, 
Papias.  Observe  his  words  :  '  Matthew  wrote  the  oracles  in 
Hebrew,  and  everyone  interpreted  them  as  he  could.'  Here 
you  may  take  '  everyone  '  in  the  strict  sense,  and  understand 


X.]  EVIDENCE   OF   PAPIAS.  iyi 

Papias  to  say  that  there  was  no  Greek  translation,  and  that 
everyone  who  desired  to  use  St.  Matthew's  Gospel  was  forced 
to  translate  it  for  himself  as  best  he  could;  or,  you  may  take 
*  everyone  '  as  more  loosely  used,  and  may  understand  Papias 
•only  to  say  that  there  was  no  authorized  Greek  translation, 
but  that  certain  persons  had  published  translations  which 
each  had  made  to  the  best  of  his  ability.  I  rather  think  the 
first  is  what  he  means:  but  in  either  case  the  point  to  observe 
is,  that  Papias  uses  the  aorist  tense  ^p/n^evo-e.  The  days  of 
new  independent  translation  appear  to  have  been  over  when 
Papias  wrote,  and  we  have  every  reason  to  believe  that  there 
was  one  authoritative  Greek  St.  Matthew.  The  citations  of 
it  are  as  early  and  as  constant  as  those  of  the  other  Gospels. 
Even  those  Fathers  who  tell  us  that  Matthew's  Greek  Gospel 
is  a  translation  seem  to  forget  themselves,  and  elsewhere  to 
speak  of  it  and  use  it  as  if  it  were  an  original.  In  short,  the 
Church  has  never  made  the  difference  between  the  first  and 
the  other  Synoptic  Gospels  that  this  theory  demands.  I 
mean  the  theory  that  in  each  of  the  latter  two  we  have  the 
work  of  an  inspired  writer:  in  the  first,  a  translation  made  by 
an  unknown  interpreter  who  clearly  acted  the  part  rather  of 
an  editor  than  translator,  and  who  in  some  places  inserted 
explanations  and  additions  of  his  own. 

The  difficulty  of  claiming  inspired  authority  for  the  Greek 
St,  Matthew  has  been  felt  so  strongly,  that  in  modern  times 
a  theory  has  been  started  to  which  no  ancient  author  gives 
countenance,  namely,  that  there  was  a  double  original :  that 
Matthew  first  wrote  in  Hebrew  and  afterwards  himself  trans 
lated  his  work  into  Greek.  If  we  are  to  reject  the  testimony 
•of  the  ancients  at  all,  I  should  prefer  to  reject  their  assertion 
that  the  Gospel  was  originally  written  in  Hebrew;  but  those 
who  say  that  it  was  testify  also  that  there  was  no  authorized 
translation.  On  this  point  both  Papias  and  Jerome  are 
-express,  so  that  it  seems  to  me  there  is  no  middle  course. 
We  must  choose  between  the  two  hypotheses — a  Greek 
original  of  St.  Matthew,  or  a  lost  Hebrew  original  with  a 
translation  by  an  unknown  author.*  Or  rather,  since  our 

*  That  the  existing  Greek  text  is  not  authoritative  is  assumed  also  by 
Eusebius.  One  of  the  solutions  which  he  offers  (Quaest.  ad  Mann.  II.) 


172  THE    ORIGINAL   LANGUAGE    OF   ST.  MATTHEW.  [x. 

Greek  Gospel  bears  marks  of  not  being  a  mere  translation, 
we  must  choose  between  the  hypotheses  that  we  have  in  the 
Greek  the  Gospel  as  written  by  Matthew  himself,  or  the 
Gospel  as  written  by  an  unknown  writer,  who  used  as  his 
principal  materials  an  Aramaic  writing  by  St.  Matthew  which 
has  now  perished. 

We  turn  back,  then,  to  examine  more  closely  the  external 
evidence  for  the  Hebrew  original,  when  we  find  that  it  melts 
away  in  a  wonderful  manner.  Observe  what  is  the  point  to- 
be  determined.  It  is  not  disputed  that  Hebrew-speaking 
sectaries  in  the  third  and  fourth  centuries  used  a  Gospel  in 
their  own  language,  and  that  they  ascribed  it  to  St.  Matthew,- 
but  the  question  is,  What  was  the  relation  of  that  Gospel  to 
our  Greek  St.  Matthew?  was  it  that  of  original  to  translation? 
For  that  purpose  we  must  inquire  what  information  is  to  be 
had  about  that  Hebrew  Gospel.  In  the  next  lecture  I  shall 
speak  of  other  Apocryphal  Gospels;  but  it  is  not  inconvenient 
to  treat  of  the  Hebrew  one  separately,  because  its  character 
is  different  from  that  of  the  others.  These  last  I  have  de 
scribed  as  either  supplemental  or  heretical :  that  is  to  say, 
as  either  such  as  assume  the  Canonical  Gospels  and  try  to 
make  additions  to  their  story,  or  else  such  as  were  framed 
to  serve  the  interests  of  some  heresy.  But  the  Hebrew 
Gospel  is  the  only  one  which  has  pretensions  to  be  an  in 
dependent  Gospel:  that  is  to  say,  one  which  claims  to  be 
set  on  a  level  with  the  Canonical  Gospels,  as  one  accepted 
by  the  Church  as  containing  an  authentic  history  of  our 
Lord's  life  and  teaching. 

I  begin  by  putting  out  of  court  the  Ebionite  Gospel 
described  by  Epiphanius,  this  being  clearly  to  be  banished 
to  the  class  of  heretical  gospels.  Epiphanius  tells  us  enough 
about  it  to  make  us  at  any  rate  sure  that  this  was  not  the 

of  the  difficulty  which  he  finds  in  Matthew's  statement,  that  Mary  Mag 
dalen's  visit  to  the  sepulchre  took  place  o^e  craQftdruv,  is  that  this  phrase, 
used  by  the  Greek  translator,  does  not  quite  accurately  give  the  meaning 
of  Matthew's  Hebrew  text,  which  would  have  been  better  expressed  by 
PpaSiov  than  o\|/e.  It  seems  to  me  not  impossible  that  Eusebius  might 
have  got  this  solution  from  Papias,  and  that  this  might  have  been  the  very 
occasion  on  which  Papias  found  occasion  to  observe  that  Matthew  had 
written  his  Gospel  in  Hebrew, 


X.]  THE   EBIONITE    GOSPEL.  173 

original  of  our  St.  Matthew.  It  contained  nothing  corre 
sponding  to  the  first  two  chapters,  and  its  actual  beginning 
was  quite  different  from  what  we  find  in  the  third  chapter. 
The  Gospel  emanated  from  the  Ebionite  sect  which  I  have 
described  already  (p.  18),  and  to  which  I  find  it  convenient 
to  give  the  distinctive  name  of  Elkesaite,  thereby  avoiding 
some  controversy  as  to  the  proper  extension  of  the  name 
Ebionite.*  These  Jewish  sectaries,  being  few  in  number  and 
not  widely  diffused,  were  little  known  to  the  Church  at  large 
until  the  end  of  the  second  century  or  the  beginning  of  the 
third,  when  an  extreme  section  of  them  assumed  an  aggres 
sive  and  proselytizing  attitude,  and  in  particular  attempted  to 
make  converts  at  Rome.  This  section  included  some  men 
who  did  not  scruple  at  literary  imposture.  They  produced 
the  Book  of  Elkesai  (see  p.  19),  and  they  refashioned  for  their 
purposes  earlier  documents  which  professed  to  relate  the 
preaching  of  Peter.  In  this  way  originated  the  Clementine 
Recognitions  and  Homilies.  It  is  for  this  section  that 
Epiphanius  reserves  the  name  Ebionite,  giving  to  the  other 
Judaizers  the  name  of  Nazarenes.  My  judgment  concerning 
what  Epiphanius  describes  as  the  Ebionite  Gospel  is,  that  it 
was  a  Greek  book  compiled  by  these  Elkesaites  for  the  use 
of  their  converts,  and  purporting  to  be  a  translation  of  the 
Hebrew  Gospel.  But  I  am  persuaded  that  these  adepts  in 
literary  forgery,  instead  of  giving  a  faithful  translation  of 
that  Gospel,  manufactured  a  new  Gospel  of  their  own,  using 
for  that  purpose  not  only  the  Gospel  according  to  St.  Matthew, 
but  also  that  according  to  St.  Luke,  and  perhaps  also  that 
according  to  St.  John.  That  this  Ebionite  Gospel  never 


*  The  name  Ebionite  seems  to  have  been  originally  given  to  all  Jewish 
Christians  who  observed  the  Mosaic  law  (Orig.  adv.  Cels.  ii.  i) ;  and 
though  the  earlier  authorities  distinguished  between  those  Christians  of 
Jewish  birth  who,  after  their  conversion,  merely  continued  to  observe 
the  Mosaic  law  themselves,  and  those  who  insisted  on  such  observance  as 
necessary  to  salvation,  and  who  besides  denied  our  Lord's  Divinity  and  His 
miraculous  Conception ;  yet  these  early  authorities  give  to  both  classes  the 
name  of  Ebionites  (see  in  particular  Orig.  adv.  Cels.  v.  61  ;  Euseb.  H.  E. 
iii.  27).  It  seems  to  have  been  first  towards  the  end  of  the  fourth  century 
that  the  name  Nazarene  was  applied  (by  Epiphanius  and  Jerome)  to  the 
first  class,  while  the  name  Ebionite  was  left  as  the  peculiar  designation  of 
the  second. 


174  THE    ORIGINAL   LANGUAGE    OF   ST.  MATTHEW.  [x. 

existed  in  Aramaic  is  more  than  I  can  venture  to  assert  ;* 
but  I  hold  that  the  Gospel  which  Epiphanius  describes  was 
in  Greek,  and  that  our  Greek  Gospels  were  used  in  it& 
manufacture. 

I  have  already  said  that  this  Elkesaite  sect  was  charac 
terized  by  an  abhorrence  of  sacrifice,  and  by  an  objection  to 
the  use  of  flesh  meat ;  and  the  extracts  given  by  Epiphanius 
show  how  they  made  their  Gospel  emphatically  sanction 
these  opinions  of  theirs.  In  one  place  (Epiph.  Haer.  xxx.  16) 
our  Lord  is  made  to  say :  '  I  came  to  put  an  end  to  sacrifices, 
and  until  ye  cease  from  sacrifices  the  wrath  of  God  shall  not 
cease  from  you.'  The  same  hand  was  evidently  at  work  here 
that  in  the  Clementine  Recognitions  (i.  64)  makes  Peter  say 
to  the  priests  in  the  temple :  '  We  are  certain  that  God  is  only 
made  more  angry  by  the  sacrifices  which  ye  offer,  seeing  that 
the  time  of  sacrifices  is  now  passed  ;  and  because  ye  will  not 
acknowledge  that  the  time  for  offering  victims  has  passed, 
your  temple  shall  be  destroyed,  and  the  abomination  of 
desolation  set  up  in  the  holy  place. 'f 

It  was  a  natural  object  of  solicitude  with  these  Elkesaites  to 
get  rid  of  the  encouragement  to  the  eating  of  flesh  afforded 
by  our  Lord's  participation  in  the  Passover  feast.  Accord 
ingly,  in  their  Gospel,  the  disciples'  question,  'Where  wilt 
thou  that  we  prepare  for  thee  to  eat  the  Passover  ?'  receives- 
from  our  Lord  the  answer,  '  Have  I  with  desire  desired  to  eat 
this  Passover,  even  flesh,  with  you  ?'  Two  things  deserve  to- 
be  noticed  in  this  passage  besides  its  hostility  to  the  use  of 
flesh.  The  first  is  that  Epiphanius,  in  commenting  on  the 
two  changes  introduced  by  the  insertion  of  the  word  '  flesh  r 
and  of  the  interrogative  particle,  describes  the  latter  as  made 
by  the  addition  of  the  two  letters  /A,  rj ;  showing  plainly  that 
it  was  a  Greek  book  he  had  before  him.  The  other  is,  that 
the  text  on  which  the  Elkesaite  forger  has  operated  is  not 
from  St.  Matthew's  Gospel,  but  from  St.  Luke's,  viz.  xxii.  15. 

Another  New  Testament  example  of  the  use  of  animal  food 

*  Epiphanius  states  (Haer.  xxx.  3)  that  both  the  Gospel  according  to  St. 
John  and  the  Acts  of  the  Apostles  had  been  translated  into  Aramaic. 

t  We  may  gather  from  this  Clementine  passage  in  what  part  of  the 
Gospel  the  saying  quoted  by  Epiphanius  was  inserted. 


X.]  THE  EBIONITE  GOSPEL.  175 

seemed  to  contradict  the  teaching  of  these  Elkesaites — I  mean 
the  passage  which  describes  locusts  as  having  been  the  food 
of  John  the  Baptist.  Accordingly  they  substituted  'His  food 
was  wild  honey,  the  taste  of  which  was  that  of  the  manna, 
as  a  honey-cake  dressed  with  oil'  (compare  Numbers  xi.  8, 
LXX.)  The  substitution  here  of  the  word  ey/cpts,  a  cake,  for 
a'/cpi?,  a  locust,  has  convinced  the  great  majority  of  critics  that 
this  Ebionite  forger  here  did  not  translate  from  the  Hebrew, 
but  worked  on  the  Greek  texts  of  our  Gospels. 

In  the  very  few  fragments  of  this  Gospel  that  have  been 
preserved  there  are  several  other  indications  of  the  use  of  St. 
Luke  besides  those  already  mentioned.  It  names  Zacharias 
and  Elisabeth  as  the  parents  of  John  the  Baptist;  it  dates  the 
preaching  of  the  Baptist,  'Caiaphas  being  the  high  priest,' 
Luke  iii.  2.  It  tells  that  Jesus,  when  He  came  forward  as  a 
teacher,  was  'about  thirty  years  of  age'  (Luke  iii.  23);  and 
it  shows  signs  of  following  Luke  iii.  21,  in  the  phrase,  'when 
the  people  were  baptized  came  Jesus  also.'  In  this  Ebionite 
Gospel  what  Matthew  calls  the  sea  of  Galilee  becomes  the 
'lake  of  Tiberias:'  'lake'  being  Luke's  ordinary  phrase  and 
'Tiberias'  John's.  And  I  am  disposed  to  recognize  as  an 
indication  of  the  use  of  St.  John's  Gospel  a  point  noted  by 
the  late  Bishop  Fitz  Gerald.  According  to  St.  John  it  was. 
the  descent  of  the  Holy  Ghost  at  our  Lord's  baptism  which 
taught  the  Baptist  to  recognize  Jesus  as  the  Son  of  God 
(John  i.  33.)  Now,  according  to  Matthew's  Gospel,  John, 
before  the  descent  of  the  Holy  Ghost,  confesses  that  he  has 
need  to  be  baptized  by  Jesus.  This  Ebionite  Gospel  trans 
poses  the  confession  so  as  to  make  it  agree  with  what  John's 
account  would  at  first  sight  appear  to  require.  And  it  is  only 
when  the  Baptist  sees  the  miracle  and  hears  the  voice  from 
heaven  that  he  falls  at  the  feet  of  Jesus,  with  the  prayer,  'I 
beseech  thee,  Lord,  do  thou  baptize  me.' 

Now,  according  to  all  the  authorities,  the  genuine  Hebrew 
Gospel  was  identical,  or  nearly  so,  with  St.  Matthew,  so  that 
these  coincidences,  not  with  Matthew,  but  with  other  Gospels, 
arrest  attention.  And  considering  by  what  tainted  hands  this 
document  is  presented,  I  will  not  detain  you  with  a  discussion 
of  the  abstract  question  whether  coincidences  with  Luke  and 


176  THE    ORIGINAL   LANGUAGE    OF    ST.  MATTHEW.  [x. 

John  ought  necessarily  to  cause  us  to  reject  the  claim  of  a 
document  to  be  regarded  as  the  original  Hebrew  Gospel. 
I  content  myself  with  expressing  my  conviction  that  this 
Ebionite  Gospel  of  Epiphanius  is  nothing  of  the  kind.  I 
look  on  it  as  a  third-century  forgery,  made  with  heretical 
intent  by  one  who  was  well  acquainted  with  the  Greek 
Gospels,  in  a  workshop  discredited  by  other  forgeries  and 
impostures;  and  I  hold  that  it  must  be  altogether  cast  out  of 
consideration  by  anyone  who  seeks  to  restore  a  considerably 
older  document,  namely,  the  Hebrew  Gospel  in  use  among 
those  whom  Epiphanius  and  Jerome  call  Nazarenes,  and  for 
which  these  sectaries  claimed  the  authorship  of  St.  Matthew. 
For  the  same  reason  it  is  only  with  great  reserve  I  can 
employ  another  source  of  information  about  the  Hebrew 
Gospel,  namely,  the  Clementine  Homilies.  These  frequently 
quote  sayings  of  our  Lord,  and  they  contain  other  passages 
resembling  texts  in  the  Canonical  Gospels,  but  often  differing 
a  good  deal  from  them  in  form.  It  was  a  natural  explanation 
of  these  variations  to  suppose  that  the  Clementine  writer  was 
quoting  a  gospel  different  from  any  of  our  four,  and  to  assume 
that  the  Gospel  which,  as  a  Jewish  Christian,  he  was  accus 
tomed  to  use  must  have  been  the  Hebrew  Gospel.  The  idea 
receives  some  confirmation  from  the  fact  that  it  is  Matthew's 
Gospel  which  the  Clementine  quotations  ordinarily  recall. 
But  they  do  not  so  exclusively.  In  a  table  of  the  Clementine 
Gospel  quotations  given  by  Westcott  {Introduction  to  the  Study 
of  the  Gospels,  p.  468)  there  are  about  sixty  coincidences  with 
St.  Matthew,  three  with  Mark,  six  with  Luke,  and  four  with 
John.  But  one  thing  must  be  borne  in  mind  before  we  infer 
that  a  peculiarity  in  the  form  of  a  Clementine  citation  implies 
that  the  writer  used  a  different  Gospel.  It  is  that  when  such 
citations  are  made  in  the  Homilies  Peter  is  usually  the 
speaker ;  and  he  is  represented  not  as  reading  our  Lord's 
sayings  from  a  book,  but  as  giving  his  own  recollections  of 
His  teaching  and  His  acts.  The  conditions  of  the  story  then 
required  that  Peter  should  show  himself  to  be  an  indepen 
dent  authority,  and  not  the  servile  copier  of  a  previous  record. 
I  feel  no  doubt  that  the  story  of  the  man  born  blind,  which 
I  have  quoted  (p.  76),  was  taken  from  St.  John ;  and  a  com- 


X.]  THE   NAZARENE   GOSPEL.  177 

parison  of  the  two  versions  shows  the  amount  of  licence 
which  the  Clementine  writer  conceived  himself  at  liberty  to 
use.  The  fact,  then,  that  a  report  of  our  Lord's  words,  made 
by  so  arbitrary  a  writer,  differs  from  the  canonical  text  gives 
us  no  assurance  that  he  derived  it  from  the  Hebrew  Gospel,  or 
even  from  any  written  source.  On  the  other  hand,  since  he 
was  no  doubt  acquainted  with  the  Hebrew  Gospel,  there  is 
always  a  possibility  of  his  having  used  it ;  and  if  the  same 
peculiar  form  of  citation  occurs  more  than  once,  or  if  it 
agrees  with  the  citation  of  another  writer,  then  we  are  led 
to  regard  it  as  taken  from  a  written  source,  and  not  impro 
bably  from  the  Hebrew  Gospel.* 

When  we  have  cast  aside  these  Elkesaite  authorities,  we 
have  no  more  copious  source  of  information  about  the  Hebrew 
Gospel  than  St.  Jerome ;  and  it  might  seem  that  he  sets  at 
rest  the  question  of  the  Hebrew  original  of  St.  Matthew,  for 
he  tells  us  that  he  had  seen  it  himself  and  made  a  copy  of  it. 
Unfortunately,  he  goes  on  to  tell  us  that  he  proceeded  to 
translate  it  into  Greek  and  Latin.  That  alone  would  lead  us 


to  suspect  that  the  book  must  be  something  different  from 


our  Gospel  of  St.  Matthew,  or  that,  if  the  latter  be  a  trans-  * 
lation,  it  cannot  be  an  accurate  translation.  And  this  sus 
picion  is  turned  into  certainty  by  abundant  extracts  which 
St.  Jerome  gives  from  the  same  book,  sufficiently  confirmed 
by  the  testimony  of  other  Fathers.  We  are  thus  enabled  to 
say  with  certainty  that  whatever  affinities  there  may  have 
been  between  this  Nazarene  Gospel  and  St.  Matthew's,  the 
latter  can  with  no  propriety  be  said  to  be  a  translation  of  the 
former.  The  Nazarene  Gospel  contained  some  things  that 

*  The  most  remarkable  instance  of  the  kind  is  the  saying  '  Be  ye 
approved  money-changers'  (yivearde  5^/ct/^ot  TpaTre^trcu),  which  I  have 
quoted  already  (p.  18).  The  meaning  of  it  was  that  we  ought  to  emulate 
the  skill  of  money-changers  in  understanding  how  to  reject  the  evil  and 
choose  the  good  (compare  I  Thess.  v.  21,  a  text  often  quoted  in  connexion 
with  this  saying).  The  saying  is  quoted  three  times  in  the  Clementine 
Homilies,  ii.  51 ;  iii.  50;  xviii.  20.  Clement  of  Alexandria,  who  is  lax  in 
his  use  of  non-canonical  and  even  heretical  documents,  expressly  quotes 
this  saying  as  Scripture  (Strom,  i.  28),  and  three  times  again  indirectly 
refers  to  it  (ii.  4  ;  vi.  10  ;  vii.  15).  It  is  also  quoted  in  the  second  century 
by  the  Gnostic  Apelles  (Epiph.  Haer.  xliv.  2).  It  is  referred  to  by  a 
whole  host  of  later  writers,  of  whom  a  list  will  be  found  in  Nicholson's 
Gospel  according  to  the  Hebrews,  p.  157. 

N 


178  THE    ORIGINAL   LANGUAGE    OF    ST.  MATTHEW.  [x. 

are  not  in  St.  Matthew,  and  wanted  some  things  that  are  in 
St.  Matthew,*  and  told  in  different  ways  stories  that  were 
common  to  both.  The  most  interesting  of  the  additions 
made  by  the  Nazarene  Gospel  to  the  Canonical  history  is 
its  account  of  our  Lord's  appearance  to  James  after  His 
resurrection.  It  runs  :  '  Now  the  Lord,  when  He  had  given 
the  linen  cloth  to  the  servant  of  the  priest,  went  to  James, 
and  appeared  to  him.  For  James  had  taken  an  oath  that  he 
would  not  eat  bread  from  that  hour  on  which  he  had  drunk 
the  cup  of  the  Lord  till  he  saw  him  risen  from  the  dead/ 
Then  our  Lord  says,  '  Bring  a  table  and  bread.'  And  a  little 
further  on  it  is  added:  '  He  took  bread,  and  blessed  and  brake, 
and  gave  it  to  James  the  Just,  and  said  to  him,  My  brother, 
eat  thy  bread,  for  the  Son  of  Man  is  risen  from  the  dead ' 
(De  Viris  Illustr.  2).  We  may  be  sure  that  if  this  story  had 
been  in  the  original  St.  Matthew,  it  would  not  have  been 
omitted  in  the  Greek  translation,  and  therefore  this  one 
specimen  would  give  ground  for  the  opinion,  which  the 
other  specimens  I  shall  produce  establish  beyond  doubt, 
that  Jerome's  Hebrew  Gospel  is  not  a  different  form  of  the 
first  Gospel,  but  to  all  intents  a  fifth  Gospel. f  It  is  another 
question  whether  the  story  may  not  be  authentic.  We  know 
from  i  Cor.  xv.  7  that  our  Lord  did  appear  to  James,  and 
nothing  forbids  us  to  believe  that  a  true  tradition  of  that 
appearance  may  have  been  preserved.  But  it  is  also  possible 
that  this  very  verse  of  i  Cor.  may  have  suggested  to  the 
Jewish  Christian  framer  of  the  Nazarene  Gospel  to  supple 
ment  the  defect  of  the  authentic  history  by  an  invented 
narrative  of  the  details  of  our  Lord's  appearance  to  the  vene 
rated  head  of  the  Jerusalem  Church.  And  some  suspicion 

*  The  proof  of  this  is,  that  the  Hebrew  Gospel  is  the  shorter.  The 
Stichometry  of  Nicephorus  gives  25OOo-Tixot  for  the  length  of  St.  Matthew, 
and  2200  for  that  of  the  Gospel  according  to  the  Hebrews.  The  authority 
here  cited  is  a  list  of  ecclesiastical  books,  with  the  length  of  each,  which  is 
evidently  very  old,  though  only  preserved  by  a  ninth-century  writer.  The 
reader  will  find  it  in  Westcott's  N.  T.  Canon,  p.  552. 

t  An  abstract  preserved  by  Photius  (Cod.  177)  gives  us  curious  infor 
mation  about  a  work  of  Theodore  of  Mopsuestia,  directed  against  a 
Western  writer  whose  name  is  not  given,  but  who  plainly  is  Jerome  ;  and 
one  of  the  charges  brought  against  him  is  that  of  having  forged  a  fifth 
Gospel.  Prof.  Westcott  has  noted  that  the  same  charge  was  brought  by 
Julian  the  Pelagian  (Augustine,  Opus  Imperf.  cont.  Julian.,  iv.  88). 


X.]  THE   NAZARENE   GOSPEL.  179 

is  suggested  by  the  fact  that  St.  Paul  puts  the  appearance  to 
James  quite  late  in  the  list  of  our  Lord's  appearances,  while 
the  Nazarene  account  would  lead  us  to  regard  it  as  one  of 
the  first. 

The  next  specimen  which  I  shall  produce  deserves  re 
mark  on  many  accounts.  It  is  quoted  by  Origen  as  well  as 
by  Jerome,  and  so  gives  us  reason  to  think  that  the  same 
Hebrew  Gospel  was  used  by  these  two  writers.  But  you 
must  observe  that  although  Origen  believed  that  the  original 
of  Matthew's  Gospel  had  been  in  Hebrew  (Euseb.  vi.  25),  it 
does  not  appear  that  he  identified  it  with  the  Hebrew  Gospel 
which  he  quotes  ;  nor  can  I  find  that  this  idea  was  enter 
tained  by  any  of  the  other  Church  writers  who  quote  what 
they  generally  call  the  Gospel  according  to  the  Hebrews. 
The  notion  seems  to  have  been  peculiar  to  St.  Jerome. 

Our  Saviour  is  introduced  as  saying,  '  My  mother  the  Holy 
Ghost  lately  took  me  by  one  of  my  hairs  and  carried  me  to 
the  great  mountain  Tabor.'*  The  words  'by  one  of  my 
hairs'  might  easily  be  accounted  for  as  an  enlargement  of 
St.  Matthew's  'led  up  of  the  Spirit'  (iv.  i),  by  an  apocryphal 
addition  (founded  on  Ezek.  viii.  3  ;  Bel  and  the  Dragon,  36), 
and  this  would  be  an  indication  that  this  Hebrew  Gospel  is 
posterior  to  our  Greek  St.  Matthew.  But  the  phrase  '  My 
mother  the  Holy  Ghost '  requires  more  comment.  In  the 
Aramaic  the  Holy  Spirit  is  denoted  by  a  feminine  noun  ; 
consequently,  in  the  Gnostic  sects,  which  took  their  origin 
where  a  Shemitic  language  was  spoken,  and  which  deduce 
the  origin  of  things  from  a  male  and  female  principle,  the 
Holy  Spirit  is  usually  the  female  principle.  Hence  Hilgen- 
feld,  who  tries  to  discover  in  St.  Matthew  an  anti-Pauline 

*  Origen  in  Johan.,  torn.  ii.  6  ;  Horn,  injerem.,  xv.  4 ;  Hieron.  in  Mich., 
vii.  6  ;  in  Isai.,  xv.  u  ;  in  Ezech.,  xvi.  13.  The  first  passage  quoted  from 
Origen  is  curious.  In  expounding  St.  John's  words  -jrdvra  81  avrov  e^eVero 
he  includes  the  Holy  Spirit  among  the  irdvra;  and  adds,  that  if  anyone 
accepts  the  Gospel  according  to  the  Hebrews,  there  is  still  no  difficulty  in 
interpreting  the  words  'my  mother  the  Holy  Ghost,'  &c.,  since  Jesus  said 
'  Whosoever  shall  do  the  will  of  my  Father  which  sent  me,  the  same  is  my 
brother  and  sister  and  mother?  In  the  second  passage  he  is  explaining 
the  words  'my  mother'  (Jer.  xv.  10),  and,  in  addition  to  other  solutions, 
notices  that  which  is  suggested — 'If  anyone  receives  "  my  mother  the 
Holy  Ghost,  &c." 

N  I 


l8o  THE   ORIGINAL   LANGUAGE   OF   ST.  MATTHEW.  [x. 

Hebrew  nucleus,  considers  that  the  part  ascribed  in  the  first 
chapter  to  the  Holy  Spirit  in  the  generation  of  our  Lord 
shows  that  this  chapter  at  least  was  no  part  of  the  original 
Hebrew,  but  must  have  been  added  by  the  Greek  translator 
or  rather  adapter.  But  St.  Jerome  gives  no  hint  that  the 
Gospel  which  he  read  was  defective  at  the  beginning;  and 
it  must  be  borne  in  mind  that  if  a  Gnostic  writer  spoke  of 
the  Holy  Spirit  as  the  mother  of  Christ  it  would  be  with 
reference  to  His  premundane  generation.  He  could  without 
inconsistency  adopt  Matthew's  account  of  the  miraculous 
birth  of  Jesus,  but  would  probably  lay  stress  chiefly  on  the 
union  of  Jesus  with  a  higher  power  at  His  baptism.  In  the 
passage  of  the  Nazarene  Gospel  which  relates  the  baptism, 
the  Holy  Spirit  addresses  our  Lord  as  '  My  Son.'  The  nar 
rative  runs  :  '  It  came  to  pass,  when  the  Lord  had  come  up 
from  the  water,  the  entire  fountain  of  the  Holy  Spirit  de 
scended  and  rested  upon  him  and  said  to  him,  My  Son,  in 
all  the  prophets  did  I  await  thee  that  thou  mightest  come 
and  I  might  rest  in  thee  :  for  thou  art  my  rest,  thou  art  my 
firstborn  Son  that  reignest  for  ever.'  I  may  as  well  quote 
also  the  account  this  Gospel  gives  of  our  Lord's  coming  to 
be  baptized  :  '  Behold  the  mother  of  the  Lord  and  his 
brethren  said  to  him,  John  the  Baptist  baptizeth  for  the 
remission  of  sins  ;  let  us  go  and  be  baptized  by  him.  But 
he  said  to  them,  Wherein  have  I  sinned  that  I  should  go 
and  be  baptized  by  him,  except,  perchance,  this  very  thing 
that  I  have  said  is  ignorance  ? ' 

I  have  given  examples  enough  to  show  that  this  Nazarene 
Gospel  was  a  very  different  book  from  our  St.  Matthew.  Lest, 
however,  it  should  be  thought  that  the  difference  between 
the  books  arises  from  one  of  them  having  received  interpola 
tions,  I  shall  show  you  how  differently  a  story  is  told  which 
both  have  in  common  :  '  Another  rich  man  said  to  Jesus, 
Master,  what  good  thing  shall  I  do  that  I  may  live  ?  He 
said,  Go  and  sell  all  that  thou  hast,  and  distribute  among  the 
poor,  and  come  and  follow  me.  But  the  rich  man  began  to 
scratch  his  head  and  was  displeased.  And  the  Lord  said  to 
him,  How  canst  thou  say  thou  hast  kept  the  law  and  the 
prophets,  since  it  is  written  in  the  law,  Thou  shalt  love  thy 


X.]  THE   NAZARENE    GOSPEL.  l8l 

neighbour  as  thyself:  and  behold  many  of  thy  brethren, 
children  of  Abraham,  are  clothed  with  dung  and  dying  with 
hunger,  while  thy  house  is  full  of  many  good  things,  and 
nothing  is  sent  out  of  it  to  them  ? '  And  turning  to  His  dis 
ciple  Simon,  who  sat  beside  Him,  he  said :  *  Simon  son  of 
John,  it  is  easier  for  a  camel  to  pass  through  the  eye  of  a 
needle  than  for  a  rich  man  to  enter  into  the  kingdom  of 
heaven.'  *  Again,  the  man  with  the  withered  hand  is  made 
to  say,  '  I  was  a  mason  seeking  a  livelihood  by  the  labour  of 
my  hands.  I  pray  thee,  Jesus,  to  restore  me  to  health,  that 
I  may  not  beg  my  bread  in  disgrace'  (Hieron.,  in  Matt.  xii. 
13).  If  so  ran  the  original  Hebrew  St.  Matthew,  our  Greek 
Evangelist  must  have  been  a  most  unfaithful  translator. 

Again,  the  parable  of  the  talents  was  improved  so  as  not 
to  inflict  so  severe  a  punishment  on  mere  sloth.  There  are 
three  servants  :  one  multiplies  his  talent ;  another  hides  it ; 
the  third  wastes  it  with  harlots  and  riotous  living.  The 
second  is  only  rebuked ;  the  third  is  cast  into  prison. f 
The  only  other  things  about  the  Hebrew  Gospel  which  I 
think  it  worth  while  to  quote  are,  that  instead  of  relating 
that  the  veil  of  the  Temple  was  rent,  it  told  that  a  lintel 
of  the  Temple  of  immense  size  was  shattered  ;  and  that  in 
the  Lord's  Prayer,  instead  of  '  daily  bread '  it  had  '  bread  for 
the  morrow.'  This  is  the  meaning  of  the  word  eTrioverios, 
adopted  by  Bishop  Lightfoot  (New  Testament  Revision,  Ap 
pendix)  ;  and  it  is  no  small  argument  in  his  favour  that 
such  was  the  interpretation  accepted  in  Palestine  apparently 
before  the  end  of  the  first  century.  But  if  the  Aramaic  had 
been  the  original,  and  had  said  plainly  '  bread  for  the  mor- 

*  This  passage  is  given  in  the  '  vetus  interpretatio '  of  Origen's  Com 
mentary  on  Matthew  xix.  (torn.  xv.  14,  Delarue,  iii.  671).  The  passage  is 
not  found  in  the  extant  Greek. 

t  This  is  told  by  Eusebius  in  one  of  the  Greek  fragments  of  his 
Theophaneia,  published  by  Mai  (Nov.  Pat.  Bibl.,  iv.  155).  The  passage 
does  not  seem  to  be  contained  in  the  Syriac  version  translated  by  Lee, 
which,  however,  contains  (p.  234)  another  quotation  from  the  Hebrew 
Gospel.  Some  critics,  who  think  unfavourably  of  other  variations  of  the 
Nazarene  Gospel  from  the  Canonical  narrative,  find  marks  of  originality  in 
this  version  of  the  parable  of  the  talents.  But  to  me  this  variation  seems 
to  show  plainly  the  handiwork  of  a  corrector  who  fancies  he  is  making  an 
improvement  and  really  changes  for  the  worse.  And  I  suspect  that  this 
corrector  was  acquainted  with  Luke  xv. 


1 82  THE    ORIGINAL    LANGUAGE   OF    ST.  MATTHEW.  [x. 

row,'  it  seems  to  me  not  likely  that  so  difficult  a  word  would 
have  been  used  in  the  translation.  The  Greek  Fathers  were 
as  much  puzzled  by  it  as  ourselves  (see  Origen,  de  Orat.  27, 
quoted  by  Lightfoot,  New  Testament  Revision,  p.  195). 

It  would  be  time  wasted  if  I  were  to  accumulate  quotations 
for  the  mere  purpose  of  showing  that  the  Nazarene  Gospel 
was  not  the  original  of  our  St.  Matthew.  The  only  wonder 
is,  how  St.  Jerome  could  ever  have  permitted  himself  to 
think  or  say  that  it  was.  As  time  went  on  he  certainly 
became  cautious  about  asserting  it,  and  usually  quotes  it 
as  '  the  Gospel  written  in  the  Hebrew  language  which  the 
Nazarenes  read ;'  and  he  sometimes  adds,  'which  is  called  by 
most  the  original  of  St.  Matthew.'*  But  it  is  still  surprising 
that  he  should  have  accepted  this  Gospel  as  the  original  St. 
Matthew  at  a  time  when  he  could  not  have  been  ignorant  of 
its  character :  for  the  very  first  time  he  speaks  of  it  he  tells 
that  he  had  already  translated  it  into  Greek  and  Latin,  and 
quotes  the  story  of  our  Lord's  appearance  to  James.  How 
ever,  our  surprise  may  abate  a  little  when  we  remember  that 
long  before  Jerome's  time  the  belief  had  been  accepted  in  the 
Church,  that  St.  Matthew's  Gospel  had  been  originally  written 
in  Hebrew.  It  was  notorious  that  the  Judaizing  sects  had  a 
Gospel  in  their  own  language  which  they  designated  as  St. 
Matthew's ;  and  no  one  ignorant  of  their  language  had  any 
reason  for  doubting  the  appellation  to  be  correct.  St.  Jerome 
would  therefore,  no  doubt,  embrace  with  eager  expectation 
the  opportunity  of  obtaining  access  to  so  valuable  a  help  to 
the  criticism  of  the  New  Testament  text,  and  would  count  the 
power  of  copying  this  document  as  one  of  the  most  precious 
fruits  of  his  Shemitic  studies.  But  after  he  had  become  ac- 


*  '  In  evangelic  quo  utuntur  Nazaraei  et  Ebionitae,  quod  nuper  in 
Graecum  de  Hebraeo  sermone  transtulimus,  et  quod  vocatur  a  plerisque 
Matthaei  authenticum '  (in  Matt.  xii.  13,  written  in  A.  D.  398).  '  Evan- 
gelium  quod  Hebraeo  sermone  conscriptum  legunt  Nazaraei '  (in  Isai. 
xi.  2,  written  in  410).  See  also  in  Ezeh.  xviii.  7  (written  in  413).  *  In 
evangelio  juxta  Hebraeos,  quod  Chaldaico  quidem  Syroque  sermone  sed 
Hebraicis  literis  scriptum  est,  quo  utuntur  usque  hodie  Nazareni — secun- 
dum  Apostolos,  sive  ut  plerique  autumant,  juxta  Matthaeum— quod  et  in 
Caesariensi  habetur  bibliotheca'  (Dial.  adv.  Pelag.  iii.,  written  in  416). 
Jerome's  first  mention  of  the  book  is  in  his  Catalogue  of  Ecclesiastical 
Writers,  written  in  392. 


X.]  THE   NAZARENE   GOSPEL.  183 

quainted  with  it,  and  had  found  that  instead  of  enabling  him 
to  correct  a  reading  here  and  there  in  the  Greek  St.  Matthew, 
it  was  a  work  so  different  from  the  Canonical  Gospel  that  a 
new  translation  was  necessary  in  order  to  inform  a  Greek 
reader  of  its  contents,  how  was  it  that  Jerome  did  not  then 
perceive  that  unless  he  owned  the  two  books  to  have  been 
different  from  the  beginning,  he  must  either  hold  the  Can 
onical  St.  Matthew  to  have  been  an  unfaithful  translation,  or 
else  the  Nazarene  Gospel  to  have  been  since  foully  corrupted  ? 
In  answering  this  question  we  must  call  to  mind  what  was 
the  great  work  of  Jerome's  life.  When  he  became  acquainted 
with  the  Hebrew  Bible  he  found  it  in  many  respects  to  be  very 
different  from  the  Septuagint  and  its  Latin  translations,  which 
were  in  current  use  all  over  the  Christian  world.  He  set  him 
self  to  revise  the  current  text,  so  as  to  bring  it  into  conformity 
with  the  original  Hebrew;  and  on  account  of  the  preference 
he  gave  to  the  latter,  he  met  with  much  opposition  and 
calumny  from  his  contemporaries.  Now  it  is  reasonable  to 
suppose  that,  notwithstanding  some  striking  variations,  there 
was  a  good  deal  of  resemblance  between  the  Nazarene  Gospel 
and  the  Canonical  Gospel  of  St.  Matthew.  The  differences 
were  probably  not  greater  than  Jerome  had  found  in  many 
places  between  the  Hebrew  and  Greek  texts  of  the  Old 
Testament.  I  believe,  then,  that  Jerome,  taking  up  the 
Nazarene  Gospel  with  every  prepossession  in  its  favour,  was 
not  hindered  by  these  differences  from  accepting  it  as  the 
original  text  of  St.  Matthew,  and  that  he  gave  it  the  pre 
ference  which,  in  the  case  of  the  Old  Testament  books,  he 
had  given  to  the  Hebrew  over  the  Greek  text.  I  do  not 
know  that  he  ever  quite  abandoned  this  view,  though  as 
years  went  on  he  became  more  cautious  in  expressing  it. 
But  though  we  gratefully  follow  St.  Jerome  in  using  an  Old 
Testament  text  cleared  of  the  accretions  which,  in  Greek 
and  Latin  Bibles,  had  gathered  round  the  original,  we  may 
rejoice  that  he  could  not  succeed  in  persuading  the  Church 
to  exchange  the  Greek  for  the  Aramaic  St.  Matthew.* 

*  Some  light  is  thrown  on  Jerome's  statement,  that  he  translated  the 
Nazarene  Gospel  into  Greek,  by  the  fact  that  his  version  of  the  Psalms  and 
of  the  Prophets  was,  with  his  approval,  rendered  into  Greek  by  Sophronius 
(De  Viris  Illustr.  134,  Praef.  in  Pss.). 


184  THE    ORIGINAL   LANGUAGE    OF   ST.  MATTHEW.  [x. 

When  we  have  arrived  at  the  conclusion  that  the  Hebrew 
Gospel  known  to  St.  Jerome  was  not  the  original  of  St.  Mat 
thew,  but  to  all  intents  a  fifth  Gospel,  we  have  still  to  consider 
what  we  ought  to  think  of  it.  Is  it  to  be  ranked  with  our 
Canonical  four,  or  with  the  Apocryphal  Gospels  of  which  I 
have  next  to  speak  ?  I  am  conscious  that  it  is  difficult  for  us 
to  divest  our  minds  of  prejudice  when  we  try  to  make  a  purely 
literary  comparison  of  the  Hebrew  and  the  Canonical  Gospels. 
However  freely  we  acknowledge  that  there  was  nothing  in 
the  nature  of  things  to  forbid  our  having  five  Gospels,  yet, 
as  the  Church  for  so  many  centuries  has  only  acknowledged 
four,  we  are  not  now  inclined  to  reopen  the  question;  and  we 
can  scarcely  be  quite  impartial  in  our  comparison  of  words 
we  have  venerated  from  our  childhood  with  words  which 
come  to  us  as  strange  and  novel.  So,  perhaps,  I  might  dis 
trust  my  own  judgment  when  the  story  of  the  rich  man 
scratching  his  head  impresses  me,  in  respect  of  claim  to 
priority  over  the  Canonical  narrative,  as  on  a  level  with  the 
versions  of  New  Testament  stories  which  good  ladies  some 
times  publish  for  the  use  of  children.  It  is  therefore  a 
satisfaction  to  me  that,  in  asserting  the  immense  superiority 
in  originality  and  simplicity  of  our  Greek  St.  Matthew  over 
the  Nazarene  Gospel,  I  have  the  adhesion  of  the  great 
majority  of  those  critics  who  pay  least  regard  to  the  au 
thority  of  ecclesiastical  tradition.  Indeed,  critics  of  the 
sceptical  school  have  generally  adopted  Schleiermacher's 
idea,  that  the  Hebrew  St.  Matthew  contained  nothing  but 
discourses  ;  and  so  they  have  felt  no  temptation  to  take 
under  their  patronage  this  Nazarene  Gospel,  which  clearly 
dealt  in  narrative  just  as  much  as  the  Canonical.  Hilgen- 
feld  is  almost  the  only  critic  of  note  who  attributes  originality 
to  this  Hebrew  Gospel.  But  he  owns  that  he  is  the  advocate 
of  a  nearly  abandoned  cause.  Volkmar,  Strauss,  Renan, 
Keim,  Lipsius,  Weizacker  agree  in  the  opinion  which  I  ex 
press  in  the  words  of  Anger  quoted  by  Hilgenfeld :  '  Evan- 
gelium  Hebraeorum,  testantibus  quae  supersunt  reliquiis, 
cognatum  cum  Ev.  Matthaei,  iis  in  rebus,  in  quibus  ab  eo 
differt,  nunquam  certo  formam  principalem,  plerumque 
indubitate  formam  derivatam  praebet.'  Indeed  it  is  quite 


X.]  THE   NAZARENE    GOSPEL.  185 

intelligible  that  the  traditions  of  a  small  sect,  which  was 
isolated  from  the  Christian  world,  and  on  that  account  un 
controlled  in  its  procedure,  should  be  liable  to  depravation 
and  corruption,  from  which  our  Gospels  were  secured,  if  by 
nothing  else,  by  the  mere  fact  that  they  so  rapidly  became 
the  property  of  mutually  distant  Churches.* 

When  we  have  acknowledged  that  this  Nazarene  Gospel, 
so  far  from  being  the  mother,  or  even  the  sister,  of  one  of 
our  Canonical  four,  can  only  claim  to  be  a  granddaughter  or 
grandniece,  it  does  not  follow  that  it  stands  on  no  higher 
level  than  the  Apocryphal  Gospels.  It  is  at  least  favourably 
distingnished  from  them  by  not  being  open  to  the  charge 
which  I  brought  against  the  rest  (p.  119),  that  they  are  silent 
about  our  Lord's  public  life,  concerning  which  it  is  not  in 
credible  that  true  traditions  might  be  in  circulation ;  while 
they  speak  copiously  on  matters  about  which  the  narrators 
were  not  likely  to  have  had  means  of  real  knowledge.  We 
may  disregard  tales  of  the  latter  kind  as  idle  chatter,  and  yet 
think  ourselves  bound  to  give  a  hearing  to  stories  concerning 
our  Lord's  public  life  which  circulated  at  no  great  distance 
from  Him  in  time  or  place.  But  I  own  that,  after  giving  them 
•a  hearing,  I  have  not  felt  disposed  to  attribute  to  them  any 
high  value.  The  most  favourable  verdict  I  have  in  any  case 
been  able  to  pass  is,  that  I  will  not  venture  to  say  that  some 
of  them  may  not  have  had  a  foundation  in  truth.  For  ex 
ample,  the  saying  '  Be  ye  good  money-changers,'  or  another 
quoted  by  Jerome,  *  Be  ye  never  glad  but  when  you  see  your 
brother  in  charity/  may,  for  all  I  know,  have  been  derived 
from  some  actual  sayings  of  our  Lord. 

Before  I  quit  the  subject  of  this  Hebrew  Gospel,  I  ought  to 
mention  that  the  earliest  trace  of  its  existence  is  that  Ignatius 
(ad  Symrn.  3),  in  arguing  against  a  Docetic  conception  of  our 
Lord's  body,  says,  'And  when,  after  His  resurrection,  He 
came  to  Peter  and  his  company,  He  said,  "  Take,  handle  me, 

*  So  Renan,  v.  104  :  «  Notre  Matthieu  s'est  conserve  intact  depuis  sa  re 
daction  definitive,  dans  les  dernieres  annees  du  ier  siecle,  tandis  que  1'Evan- 
gile  hebreu,  vu  1'absence  d'une  orthodoxie,  jalouse  gardienne  des  textes, 
dans  les  Eglises  judai'santes  de  Syrie,  a  etc  remanie  de  siecle  en  siecle,  si 
bien  qu'  a  la  fin  il  n'etait  pas  fort  superieur  a  un  Evangile  apocryphe.' 


1  86  THE   ORIGINAL   LANGUAGE    OF   ST.  MATTHEW.  [x. 


and  see  that  I  am  not  a  spirit  without  body  "  ' 
doxo/taro!/).  We  might  suppose  that  this  was  a  free  quotation 
of  Luke  xxiv.  39  ;  but  we  find  from  Jerome  that  the  words 
'  incorporale  daemonium'  were  found  in  his  Nazarene  Gos 
pel,  to  which  accordingly  he  refers  this  quotation.*  It  would 
be  quite  natural  that  Ignatius,  being  a  native  of  Syria,  should 
use  an  Aramaic  Gospel.  On  the  other  hand,  it  is  to  be  re 
marked  that  Eusebius,  who  quotes  this  phrase  from  Ignatius 
(H.  E.  iii.  36),  does  not  know  where  he  got  it;  and  yet  Euse 
bius,  at  least  when  he  wrote  the  Theophaneia,  knew  the 
Hebrew  Gospel.  Again,  Origen  in  the  preface  to  his  Ilepl 
Ap^wv  (Delarue,  i.  47)  says  that  the  saying  is  derived  from 
the  apocryphal  book  Doctrina  Petri.  It  is  best  to  acknow 
ledge  that  our  means  of  information  do  not  enable  us  to 
speak  positively  as  to  the  filiation  of  these  different  docu 
ments.  In  any  case  we  know  that  Hegesippus,  in  the  second 
century,  used  the  Hebrew  Gospel  (Euseb.  H.  E.  iv.  22).f 

I  return  to  the  question  as  to  the  original  language  of 
St.  Matthew,  respecting  which  the  evidence  takes  a  new 
complexion  from  what  we  have  learned  as  to  the  Nazarene 
Gospel.  We  might  have  lightly  regarded  the  assertion  that 
Matthew's  Gospel  was  originally  written  in  Hebrew,  if  it  were 
made  only  by  men  who  had  never  seen  the  book,  or  who  did 
not  understand  the  language,  and  were  therefore  incompetent 
to  judge  whether  the  Aramaic  book  which  was  in  use  among 
certain  Jewish  sectaries  could  justly  claim  priority  over  the 
Greek  Gospel.  But  the  question  seemed  decided  by  the 
testimony  of  St.  Jerome,  who  had  himself  examined  the 
Aramaic  book.  But  now  Jerome,  when  cross-examined,. 
passes  over  as  a  witness  to  the  opposite  side,  convincing  us 
of  the  comparative  lateness  of  the  only  Aramaic  Gospel  that 


*  De  Viris  Illustr.  16  ;  in  Isai.  Lib.  18,  Praef. 

t  On  the  New  Testament  quotations  of  Ignatius,  see  Zahn,  Ignatius 
•von  Antiochien,  p.  595,  et  seqq.;  and  Lightfoot's  Index,  Ignatius,  ii.  p. 
1107.  The  Fragments  of  the  Hebrew  Gospel  have  been  often  collected. 
The  most  recent  collections  are  by  Westcott,  Introduction  to  the  Study  of 
the  Gospels,  452,  etseqq.  ;  Nicholson,  The  Gospel  according  to  the  Hebrews; 
Hilgenfeld,  Novum  Testamentum  extra  Canonem  Receptum,  the  section 
treating  of  the  Gospel  according  to  the  Hebrews  having  been  lately 
published  in  a  second"  edition,  1884. 


X.]  THE   NAZARENE   GOSPEL.  187 

any  of  the  witnesses  had  seen.  We  have  therefore  to  fall  back 
on  the  earlier  witnesses,  and  we  have  now  to  consider  what 
their  evidence  is  worth,  especially  when  we  bear  in  mind  that 
if  their  opinion  was  influenced  by  belief  in  the  pretensions 
made  for  the  Hebrew  Gospel  of  their  own  day,  they  were 
mistaken  in  that  belief.  If,  for  example,  we  think  the  '  it  is 
said '  of  Eusebius  sufficient  evidence  to  induce  us  to  believe 
that  Pantaenus  was  shown  in  India  a  Gospel  in  Hebrew 
letters,  we  may  still  reasonably  doubt  whether  this  was  a 
copy  of  the  original  St.  Matthew  left  there  by  St.  Bartholomew, 
or  simply  a  copy  of  the  Nazarene  Gospel.  As  for  our  earliest 
witness,  Papias,  I  do  not  attach  overwhelming  weight  to  his 
easy  reception  of  the  statement  that  Matthew's  Gospel  was 
originally  Hebrew.  He  knew  that  Palestine  was  bilingual, 
so  that  the  thing  would  appear  to  him  probable ;  and  it 
supplied  a  key  to  difficulties  he  may  have  met  with  in 
harmonizing  the  Gospels  ;  but  it  is  very  unlikely  that  he 
himself  either  saw  the  Gospel,  or  could  read  it  if  he  did  see 
it.  If  we  had  not  better  evidence,  I  doubt  if  we  could 
attribute  much  value  to  the  opinion  of  a  bishop  of  Phrygia  as 
to  the  extent  to  which  Palestine  had  been  bilingual  fifty  years 
before ;  for  this  is  a  point  on  which  distance  of  place  is  a 
great  bar  to  accurate  knowledge.  I  could  ask  questions  as  to 
the  language  or  dialect  spoken  in  different  parts  of  the  Con 
tinent  that  I  dare  say  most  of  you  would  beg  to  be  excused 
from  answering.  I  doubt  whether  many  educated  Frenchmen 
would  have  confidence  in  saying  whether  a  Welsh  Member  of 
Parliament  would  address  his  constituents  in  Welsh,  or  an 
Irish  one  in  Irish. 

Actually,  however,  I  believe  that  Greek  was  as  generally 
spoken  in  Palestine  in  our  Lord's  time  as  English  now  is  in 
the  West  of  Ireland.  Greek  was  the  language  of  the  law 
courts  and  of  business.  Accordingly,  a  knowledge  of  Greek 
could  only  be  dispensed  with  by  those  who  were  too  high  or 
too  low  to  be  concerned  in  mercantile  matters.  I  think, 
however,  that  Josephus  has  been  misunderstood  when  he  has 
been  supposed  to  say  (Ant.  xx.  12)  that  those  of  high  rank 
did  not  know  Greek.  What  he  says  is,  that  a  knowledge  of 
foreign  languages  was  an  accomplishment  in  which  they  took 


1 88  THE   ORIGINAL   LANGUAGE   OF   ST.  MATTHEW.  [x. 

no  pride,  it  being  one  possessed  by  the  lower  class  of  freemen, 
and  even  by  slaves.     '  Those  only  were  regarded  as  wise  who 
were  accurately  acquainted  with  the  law,  and  were  able  to 
interpret  the  Holy  Scriptures.'     In  the  Acts,   you  will  re 
member  that  the  chief  captain,  taking  Paul  for  a  leader  of 
sicarii,  is  surprised  that  he  can  speak  Greek.     On  the  other 
hand,  when  Paul  addresses  the  people  from  the  Temple  steps, 
they  expect  him  to  speak  Greek,  but  are  gratified,  and  become 
attentive,  on  being  addressed  in  their  own  language.    Peter's 
discourse  on  the  day  of  Pentecost,  and  his  address  to  Cor 
nelius,  must,  from  the  nature  of  the  case,  have  been  delivered 
in  Greek  ;  and  it  is  not  unreasonable  to  think  the  same  of 
some  other  speeches  recorded  in  the  early  chapters  of  the 
Acts.     Dr.  Roberts,  in  his  interesting  book,  Discussions  on 
the  Gospels,  contends  that  our  Lord  Himself  commonly  spoke 
Greek,   and  he  at  least  makes  it  probable  that  He  did  so 
sometimes.*     He  appeals  to  what  we  are  told  (Mark  iii.  7) 
of  a  great  multitude  having  followed  our  Lord  '  from  Idumea 
and  from  beyond  Jordan,  and  they  about  Tyre  and  Sidon,' 
the  presumption  being  that  if  they  followed  Him  they  could 
understand  His  teaching ;  and  people  from  the  regions  just 
named  would  not  be  likely  to  do  this  unless  He  spoke  Greek. 
He  draws  another  proof  from  St.  John's  report  of  our  Lord's 
conversation  with  Pilate,  in  which  we  are  not  told  that  the 
services  of  an  interpreter  were  employed.     Greek  seems  to 
have  been  more  prevalent  in  Galilee,  which  is  called  Galilee 
of  the   Gentiles,    than   in   Jerusalem.      St.    Matthew,   as   a 
collector  of  taxes,  could  hardly  have  dispensed  with  a  know 
ledge  of  Greek.     We  know  that  the  two  Jewish  Apostles, 
Peter,  the  Apostle  of  the  Circumcision,  and  James,  the  head 
of  the  Jerusalem  Church,  have  left  Epistles  in  Greek.     And, 
what  is  remarkable,  the  letter  of  that  specially  Jewish  Apostle, 
St.  James,  is  perhaps  the  best  Greek  in  the  New  Testament. 
The  conclusion,  then,  which  I  draw  from  these  facts  is, 
that  there  is  not  the  least  difficulty  in  believing  that  Matthew 
might  have  written  a  Gospel  in  Greek,  even  on  the  supposition 


*  On  the  other  side  of  the  question  deserves  to  be  studied  an  essay  by 
Neubauer,  Studio.  Biblica,  1885. 


X.]  GREEK   ORIGINAL   MORE   PROBABLE.  189 

that  he  intended  it  only  for  the  use  of  the  Christians  in  Pales 
tine  ;  and  the  first  Gospel  contains  internal  evidence  that  it 
was  meant  to  have  a  wider  circulation.     On  the  other  hand,. 
the  proof  I  have  given  from  Josephus  (p.  141)  of  the  literary 
use  of  the  Aramaic  language  in  his  time  makes  it  equally  easy 
to  accept  evidence  of  the  existence  of  an  apostolic  Hebrew 
Gospel,  if  only  decisive  evidence  for  its  existence  were  forth 
coming.     But  it  does  not  appear  that  any  of  the  witnesses 
had  themselves  seen  such  a  Gospel,  and  there  is  no  evidence 
of  the  existence  of  any  Greek  text  but  the  one  which  was 
universally  regarded  as  authoritative.    Cureton  imagined  that 
he  could  gain  evidence  for  the  Hebrew  original  of  St.  Matthew 
from  the  Syriac  version  which  he  published,  and  which  he  con 
tended  had  not  been  made  from  Greek,  but  from  the  original 
Aramaic.     However,  on  that  point  he  has  failed  to  convince 
scholars.*     I  cannot  help  thinking  that  if  there  had  existed 
in  use  among  Hebrew-speaking  Christians  what  was  known 
to    be    the   real   original   Gospel   written   by   St.    Matthew, 
such  a  corrupt  version  of  it  as  that  circulated  among  the 
Nazarenes  could  not  have  gained  acceptance ;  and  that  the 
origin  of  the  latter  Gospel  is  more  easily  explained  if  we 
suppose  that  it  was  in  Greek  the  facts  of  the  Gospel  history 
had  been  authoritatively  published,   and   if  we  regard  the 
Nazarene  Gospel  as  an  attempt  made  by  one  not  very  scrupu 
lous  about  accuracy  to  present  these  facts  to  those  who  spoke 
Aramaic.     For  these  reasons,  and  on  account  of  the  signs  of 
originality  already  mentioned,  which   are  presented  by  the 
Greek  Gospel,  I  am  disposed  to  pronounce  in  favour  of  the 
Greek  original  of  St.  Matthew. 

But  it  has  been  objected,  The  great  majority  of  the  early 
witnesses  who  tell  us  that  Matthew  wrote  a  Gospel  tell  us 
also  that  he  wrote  it  in  Hebrew.  If  you  do  not  accept  their 
testimony  on  the  latter  point,  why  accept  it  on  the  former  ? 
And  then  what  reason  is  there  for  supposing  that  our  present 


*  See  his  Preface,  p.  vi.,  and  an  interesting  section  on  the  Hebrew 
Gospel,  pp.  Ixxiv.,  &c.  Renan  says  (v.  98)  :  'C'est  bien  a  tort  qu'on  a 
suppose  que  la  version  syriaque  de  Saint  Matthieu  publiee  par  Cureton  a 
etc  faite  sur  Poriginal  arameen  de  Saint  Matthieu.  L'idee  qu'elle  serait 
cet  original  meme  est  tout  a  fait  chimerique. 


I QO  THE    ORIGINAL   LANGUAGE    OF   ST.  MATTHEW.  [x. 

Greek  Gospel  comes  from  St.  Matthew  at  all  ?  Well,  I  do 
not  think  that  the  two  things  stand  on  the  same  level  of  testi 
mony.  In  the  case  of  Papias,  for  example,  it  seems  to  me 
plain  that  the  Gospel  of  which  he  speaks  bore  the  title  of  St. 
Matthew,  and  was  accepted  as  such  by  the  Christian  world  of 
the  time.  The  statement  that  it  had  been  written  in  Hebrew 
rests  on  a  private  tradition,  for  all  we  know,  first  made  public 
by  Papias  himself:  and  Papias  has  been  generally  condemned 
as  over  credulous  with  respect  to  some  of  the  traditions  which 
he  accepted.  If  the  Greek  Gospel  had  been,  as  some  suppose, 
only  based  on  the  Hebrew  Gospel  of  Matthew,  but  was  actually 
the  work  of  one  of  the  second  generation,  I  do  not  know  why 
the  name  of  the  real  author  should  have  been  suppressed  ;  for 
the  second  and  third  Gospels  bear  the  names  of  those  who 
were  supposed  to  be  their  real  authors,  and  not  those  of  the 
Apostles  on  whose  authority  they  were  believed  to  rest.  So 
that,  if  Matthew  did  not  write  the  first  Gospel,  I  do  not  think 
the  name  of  Matthew  would  have  been  necessary  to  gain  it 
acceptance  in  the  Church.  In  any  case,  the  fact  of  this 
acceptance  by  the  Church  may  suffice  for  our  faith;  for 
though  I  believe  the  first  Gospel  to  have  been  written  by  an 
Apostle,  and  the  second  and  third  not,  I  make  no  difference 
in  my  reception  of  them,  nor  do  I  find  that  any  such  differ 
ence  was  ever  made  by  Christians.  From  the  earliest  times 
of  which  we  have  knowledge  all  were  alike  received  as 
indisputably  authentic  records  of  the  deeds  and  words  of 
Christ. 


XI. 


APOCRYPHAL  AND  HERETICAL  GOSPELS. 


OOME  fifty  years  ago  or  more,  a  Mr.  Hone,*  who  was  at 
*^  that  time  an  opponent  of  orthodoxy,  if  not  of  Chris 
tianity  (though  I  understand  he  afterwards  regretted  the  line 
he  had  taken),  published  what  he  called  the  Apocryphal  New 
Testament,  which  had  considerable  sale  at  the  time,  and 
which  may  still  be  picked  up  on  stalls  or  at  auctions.  The 
object  of  the  publication  clearly  was  to  disparage  the  pre 
eminent  authority  which  we  ascribe  to  the  books  of  our  New 
Testament,  by  making  it  appear  that  those  which  we  honour 
had  been  picked  out  of  a  number  of  books  with  tolerably 
equal  claims  to  our  acceptance,  the  selection  having  been 
made  by  persons  in  whom  we  have  no  reason  to  feel  much 
confidence.  The  work  professes  to  be  an  answer  to  the 
question,  'After  the  writings  contained  in  the  New  Testament 
were  selected  from  the  numerous  Gospels  and  Epistles  then 
in  existence,  what  became  of  the  books  that  were  rejected  by 
the  compilers  ?'  The  epoch  of  the  compilation  is  apparently 
assumed  to  be  that  of  the  Council  of  Nicaea.  The  writer,  at 
least,  quotes  a  mediaeval  story,  that  the  selection  of  Canonical 
books  was  then  made  by  miracle,  the  right  books  having 
jumped  up  on  the  table,  and  the  wrong  ones  remained  under 
it;  and  it  would  seem  as  if,  though  rejecting  the  miracle, 
he  received  the  fact  that  the  Council  settled  the  Canon.  He 


*  The  same  who  gained  a  victory  over  the  Government  of  the  day  by  an 
acquittal  on  a  charge  of  blasphemous  libel,  tried  before  Lord  Ellenborough 
in  1817. 


192  THE   APOCRYPHAL   GOSPELS.  [xi. 

proceeds  to  quote  some  remarks  from  Jortin  on  the  violence 
of  the  proceedings  at  the  Council,  and  we  are  given  to 
understand  that  if  the  selection  was  not  made  then,  it  was 
made  by  people  not  more  entitled  to  confidence.  He  then 
gives  a  selection  of  Apocryphal  Gospels,  Acts  and  Epistles, 
taken  from  works  of  orthodox  writers,  but  divided  by  himself 
into  verses  (and,  where  that  had  not  been  done  before,  into 
chapters),  obviously  with  the  intention  of  giving  to  these 
strange  Gospels,  Epistles  and  Acts,  as  nearly  as  possible  the 
same  appearance  to  the  eye  of  the  English  reader  as  that 
presented  by  the  old  ones  with  which  he  was  familiar. 

I  need  not  tell  you  that  the  Council  of  Nicaea  did  not 
meddle  with  the  subject  of  the  Canon,  and  so  we  need  not 
trouble  ourselves  to  discuss  the  proofs  that  the  members  of 
that  venerable  Synod  were  frail  and  fallible  men  like  our 
selves.  The  fact  is  that,  as  I  have  already  told  you,  authority 
did  not  meddle  with  the  question  of  the  Canon  until  that 
question  had  pretty  well  settled  itself ;  and,  instead  of  this 
abstention  weakening  the  authority  of  our  sacred  books,  the 
result  has  been  that  the  great  majority  have  far  higher  autho 
rity  than  if  their  claims  rested  on  the  decision  of  any  Council, 
however  venerable.  They  rest  on  the  spontaneous  consent  of 
the  whole  Christian  world,  Churches  the  most  remote  agree 
ing  independently  to  do  honour  to  the  same  books.  Some  of 
the  books  which  Mr.  Hone  printed  as  left  out  by  the  com 
pilers  of  our  Canon  were  not  in  existence  at  the  time  when 
that  Canon  established  itself;  and  the  best  of  the  others  is 
separated,  in  the  judgment  of  any  sober  man,  by  a  very  wide 
interval  from  those  which  we  account  Canonical.  Mr.  Hone's 
insinuation  has,  I  understand,  been  repeated  in  a  later  edition, 
which  I  have  not  seen,  in  a  still  grosser  form  ;  the  title-page 
being  '  The  Suppressed  Gospels  and  Epistles  of  the  Original 
New  Testament  of  Jesus  Christ,  venerated  by  the  primitive 
Christian  Churches  during  the  first  four  centuries,  but  since, 
after  violent  disputations,  forbidden  by  the  bishops  of  the 
Nicene  Council,  in  the  reign  of  the  Emperor  Constantine.' 

A  work  having  a  title  not  unlike  Hone's  was  published 
a  few  years  ago  by  Hilgenfeld  :  Novum  Testamentum  extra 
Canonem  Receptum.  But  it  is  a  work  of  a  very  different  kind 


XI.]  THE   APOCRYPHAL    GOSPELS.  193 

from  Hone's  catch-penny  publication,  having  been  compiled 
by  a  man  of  real  learning.  It  includes  nothing  that  is  not 
really  ancient,  and  the  greater  part  of  it  is  occupied  with  the 
writings  of  the  so-called  Apostolic  Fathers,  which,  indeed, 
also  appear  in  Hone's  collection.  I  have  thought  it  would  be 
useful  to  give  you,  in  this  course  of  lectures,  some  account 
of  those  writings  which  at  any  time  obtained  credit  in  the 
Church  of  the  same  kind  as  was  given  to  our  Canonical 
Scriptures,  though  in  degree  infinitely  below  that.  I  speak, 
then,  to-day  of  Apocryphal  Gospels.  Hilgenfeld  does  not 
admit  into  his  collection  any  of  the  Apocryphal  Gospels  that 
have  come  down  to  us  entire  ;  I  presume,  not  judging  them 
of  sufficient  antiquity  to  deserve  a  place.  What  he  gives 
are  merely  the  fragmentary  extracts,  which  different  Fathers 
have  preserved,  of  the  Ebionite  Gospels,  of  which  I  spoke 
in  the  last  lecture,  and  of  one  or  two  heretical  Gospels,  of 
which  I  shall  speak  to-day. 

Of  Gospels  which  have  come  down  to  us  entire,  I  place 
first,  on  many  grounds,  that  called  the  Gospel  of  James,  or 
Protevangelium,  which  has  come  down  to  us  in  more  than 
fifty  MSS.,  and  has  been  translated  into  many  languages  both 
of  East  and  West.  The  object  of  this  Gospel  is  clearly 
supplementary  to  our  Gospels,  and  it  is  intended  to  satisfy 
the  curiosity  of  Christians  with  regard  to  the  things  which 
took  place  before  the  birth  of  our  Lord.  If  we  are  to  ascribe 
to  the  book  any  'tendency'  beyond  the  simple  desire  to 
gratify  curiosity,  the  doctrine  which  the  inventor  seems  most 
solicitous  to  establish  is  that  of  the  perpetual  virginity  of  the 
Virgin  Mary. 

It  is  this  book  which  invented  the  names  Joachim  and 
Anne  for  the  parents  of  Mary.  It  tells  how  they  had  been 
childless  to  old  age  ;  how  an  angel  appearing  separately  to 
each  of  them,  announced  to  them  the  birth  of  a  child  ;  how 
they  vowed  to  dedicate  to  the  Lord  that  which  should  be 
born,  and  how,  in  fulfilment  of  this  vow,  Mary  was  brought 
to  the  Temple  at  the  age  of  three  years.  When  she  comes  to 
the  age  of  twelve,  the  priests  will  not  take  the  responsibility 
of  having  charge  of  a  marriageable  virgin  at  the  Temple,  and 
they  seek  a  widower  to  whose  charge  to  commit  her.  All  the 

o 


IQ4  THE   APOCRYPHAL   GOSPELS.  [xi. 

widowers  are  assembled;  and  in  order  to  choose  between 
them  a  miraculous  test  is  employed,  the  idea  of  which  is 
derived  from  the  history  of  Aaron's  rod  that  budded.  They 
each  give  in  their  rod,  and  from  Joseph's  rod  alone*  there 
issues  a  dove,  so  that  he  is  chosen  to  have  the  charge,  much 
against  his  will,  for  we  are  carefully  told  that  he  had  children 
already.  The  story  of  the  appearance  of  the  angel  Gabriel 
and  the  annunciation  of  the  Saviour's  birth  is  told  almost  in 
the  words  of  Luke,  except  with  the  addition  that  the  angel 
appeared  to  Mary  as  she  was  drawing  water.  We  find 
mention  made  also  of  the  dumbness  of  Zacharias,  and  of 
the  taxing  under  Caesar  Augustus,  in  such  a  way  as  to  leave 
no  room  for  doubt  that  Luke's  Gospel  was  used;  while  the 
account  of  Herod  and  the  wise  men,  the  explanation  of  the 
name  Jesus,  '  because  he  shall  save  his  people  from  their 
sins,'  and  other  particulars,  are  so  given  as  to  make  it  equally 
clear  that  this  Gospel  presupposes  St.  Matthew's.  There  is 
a  story  that  when  Mary's  pregnancy  was  discovered,  both  she 
and  Joseph  were  made  to  clear  themselves  by  drinking  the 
water  of  jealousy.  The  birth  of  her  child  is  made  to  take 
place,  not  in  the  stable  of  the  inn,  but  in  a  cave  by  the 
roadside  where  the  labour-pains  suddenly  come  on  her.  A 
midwife  is  found,  who  expresses  the  greatest  amazement  at 
a  virgin  bringing  forth.  Salome,  who,  on  hearing  of  this 
prodigy,  refuses  to  believe  unless  she  herself  verify  the  fact, 
is  punished  by  having  her  hand  withered,  until,  on  her  repent 
ance,  she  is  healed  by  touching  the  child.  The  work  is 
supposed  to  be  written  by  James,  immediately  after  the  death 
of  Herod  ;  and  the  last  things  related  are  a  miraculous  rescue 
of  the  infant  John  the  Baptist  from  the  massacre  of  the 
children,  by  means  of  a  mountain  opening  and  hiding  him 
and  his  mother ;  and  a  consequent  murder  of  Zacharias  the 
priest  by  Herod's  command,  when  his  child  could  not  be 
found.  This  story  may  be  regarded  as  bearing  witness  to 
the  presence  in  the  Gospel  used  by  the  fabulist  of  the  text, 
*  Zacharias  whom  ye  slew  between  the  Temple  and  the  altar.' 

*  Accordingly,  a  prominent  feature  in  pictures  of  the  Marriage  of  the 
Virgin,  by  Raphael  and  his  predecessors,  is  that  of  the  disappointed  suitors 
breaking  their  useless  rods. 


XI.]  THE   PROTEVANGELIUM.  195 

His  blood  is  represented  as  miraculously  congealing,  and 
refusing  to  be  removed  till  the  avenger  came.* 

From  this  sketch  of  the  contents  of  the  Protevangelium 
you  will  see  that  it  is  merely  an  attempt  to  embroider  with 
legend  the  simpler  narrative  of  the  earlier  Evangelists,  and 
that  it  could  not  have  come  into  existence  if  they  had  not 
gained  a  position  of  acknowledged  credit  long  before. 

The  Gospel  which  I  have  described  can  certainly  lay  claim 
to  very  high  antiquity.  It  was  undoubtedly  in  full  circulation 
before  the  end  of  the  fourth  century,  for  it  is  clearly  used  by 
Epiphanius  in  his  work  on  Heresy,  written  about  376-!  We 
can,  without  quitting  undisputed  ground,  carry  the  evidence 
of  the  use  of  the  book  back  to  the  very  beginning  of  this 
century;  for  Peter  of  Alexandria,  who  died  in  311,  gives  an 
account  of  the  death  of  Zacharias,  which  is  clearly  derived 
from  this  Gospel.  J  In  the  preceding  century  Origen  (in  Matt., 
torn.  x.  17)  speaks  of  the  opinion  that  the  'brethren  of  our 
Lord  '  were  sons  of  Joseph  by  a  former  wife,  as  a  tradition 
derived  from  'the  Gospel  according  to  Peter '§  and  the  'book 
of  James;'  and  I  see  no  sufficient  reason  for  doubting  that 
this  was  in  substance  the  same  as  the  still  extant  book  which 
bears  the  name  of  James.  It  is  true  that  Origen  elsewhere,  || 
not  professing  to  quote  the  book  of  James,  but  relating  a  tra 
dition  which  had  come  to  him,  gives  an  account  of  the  death 
of  Zacharias  different  from  that  already  mentioned.  He  is 
said  to  have  been  put  to  death,  not  on  the  occasion  of  the 

*  This  story  of  the  blood  is  derived  from  a  Jewish  story  of  a  miraculous 
bubbling  of  the  blood  of  Zacharias  the  son  of  Jehoiada,  which  refused  to  be 
stilled,  though  Nebuzaradan  slew  94,000  of  the  chief  of  the  Jews  in  the 
hope  that  by  the  addition  of  their  blood  that  of  Zacharias  might  be  quieted. 
— See  Whitby's  commentary  on  Matt,  xxiii.  35,  or  Midrasch  Echo,  Rabbati 
{Wiinsche's  translation),  p.  21. 

f  Haer.  Ixxix.  5  ;  Ixxviii.  7  :  see  also  Greg.  Nyss.  Orat.  in  diem  Natal, 
Christi,  Opp.  Paris,  1638,  vol.  iii.,  346. 

%  Routh's  Rell.  Sac.  iv.  44. 

§  Of  this  book  no  extracts  have  been  preserved,  and  apparently  it  never 
had  a  very  wide  range  of  circulation.  It  dates  from  the  second  century, 
and  our  chief  information  about  it  is  from  a  letter  of  Serapion,  bishop  of 
Antioch  at  the  end  of  that  century,  who  had  at  first  permitted  the  use  of 
it  in  his  diocese,  but  withdrew  his  permission  on  closer  acquaintance  with 
the  book,  which  though  in  the  main  orthodox,  contained  some  things  that 
favoured  the  Docetic  heresy  (Euseb.  H.  £.,  vi.  12  :  see  also  iii.  3  and  25), 

||  Series  Cornm.  in  Matt.  §  25. 

O  2 


iq6  THE  APOCRYPHAL   GOSPELS.  [xi. 

slaughter  of  the  Innocents,  but  later,  and  because  he  had 
permitted  Mary,  notwithstanding  the  birth  of  her  child,  to 
stand  in  the  place  assigned  to  virgins  in  the  Temple.  The 
truth  seems  to  be  that  more  than  one  of  those  who  accepted 
from  the  Protevangelium  that  the  Zacharias  slain  between  the 
Temple  and  the  altar  was  the  father  of  the  Baptist,  attempted 
to  improve  on  the  account  there  given  of  the  cause  of  his 
death.  A  Gnostic  story  on  the  subject  is  told  by  Epiphanius 
(Haer.  xxvi.  12);  and  another  orthodox  account  is  reported 
by  Jerome  in  his  commentary  on  Matthew  xxiii.  35.  We 
might  be  sure  that  the  Protevangelium  was  the  book  of  which 
Origen  speaks,  if  we  had  earlier  traces  of  its  existence ;  but 
the  indications  are  uncertain.  Clement  of  Alexandria  (Strom. 
vii.  1 6)  has  the  story  of  the  midwife's  attestation  of  Mary's 
virginity ;  but  it  must  be  owned  that  Tertullian  seems  igno 
rant  of  this  tale  (De  Cam.  Christ.  23) :  and  although  he 
knows  a  story  (Scorpiace  8)  of  stones  retaining  the  marks 
of  the  blood  of  Zacharias,  the  reference  seems  to  be  to 
the  Jewish  story  about  the  son  of  Jehoiada,  already  quoted. 
Justin  Martyr  has  also  been  claimed  as  recognizing  the 
Protevangelium :  both,  for  instance,  represent  our  Lord's 
birth  as  taking  place  in  a  cave  ;  but  this  may  have  been  a 
local  tradition  (see  p.  71).  Other  coincidences  have  been 
pointed  out  by  Hilgenfeld :  for  instance,  the  phrase  \apav 
Xafiovcra  Ma/oia/x,  (Trypho  100;  Protev.  12).  On  the  whole, 
I  regard  the  Protevangelium  as  a  second-century  composi 
tion  ;  and  though  I  admit  that  the  form  now  extant  may 
exhibit  some  variations  from  the  original  text,  I  do  not 
believe  that  these  changes  could  have  been  considerable, 
or  such  as  to  affect  the  general  character  of  the  document. 
You  see  there  is  no  great  misstatement  in  describing  this 
as  one  of  the  books  rejected  by  the  framers  of  our  Canon. 
It  was  a  book  which,  in  point  of  antiquity,  might  have  got 
into  our  Canon,  unless,  indeed,  it  be  admitted  that  a  book 
only  making  its  appearance  in  the  middle  of  the  second 
century  was  far  too  late  to  have  a  chance  of  being  placed 
on  a  level  with  our  Gospels. 

I  pass  briefly  over  Gospels  which  bear  the  same  relation 
to  the  Protevangelium  that  it  bears  to  the  Synoptic  Gospels ; 


XI.]  THE   GOSPEL   OF   ST.  THOMAS.  197 

and  which,  if  that  be  the  child  of  these  Gospels,  are  only 
their  grandchildren :  I  mean  fictions  which,  taking  the  Pro- 
tevangelium  as  their  basis,  enrich  with  further  ornaments 
and  supplements  the  story  as  it  was  there  told.  Of  such 
a  kind  is  the  Gospel  of  the  pseudo-Matthew,  a  work  not 
earlier  than  the  fifth  century.  Some  of  the  particulars,  how 
ever,  which  it  added  to  the  story  have  passed  into  current 
ecclesiastical  mythology.  For  instance,  it  tells  how  Mary, 
after  coming  out  of  the  cave,  laid  her  child  in  a  manger, 
and  how  the  ox  and  the  ass  which  were  there  adored  the 
child ;  thus  fulfilling  the  prophecy,  '  the  ox  knoweth  his 
owner  and  the  ass  his  master's  crib ; '  as  also  another  pro 
phecy  of  Habakkuk :  for  in  the  beginning  of  the  third 
chapter,  where  we  translate  '  in  the  midst  of  the  years 
make  known,'  the  Septuagint  has  '  in  the  midst  of  two 
animals  thou  shalt  be  known.'  You  must  be  familiar  with 
the  ox  and  the  ass  in  stories  and  pictures  of  our  Lord's 
birth.  This  Gospel  tells  also  of  wonders  that  took  place 
in  the  flight  to  Egypt :  how  lions  and  leopards  adored  the 
child,  and  harmlessly  bore  company  to  the  party;  how  a 
palm-tree  at  the  child's  command  bowed  down  its  head  and 
supplied  its  fruit  to  satisfy  His  mother's  need ;  how,  when 
He  entered  the  idol  temple  in  Egypt,  the  idols  all  fell  with 
their  faces  to  the  ground,  and  there  lay  broken  and  shattered. 
This  pseudo-Matthew  contains  at  the  end  a  section  taken 
from  the  false  Gospel,  of  which  I  have  next  to  speak. 

The  Gospel  of  St.  Thomas  treats  of  the  infancy  and  child 
hood  of  our  Lord.  This  work,  in  its  original,  does  not  ap 
pear  to  have  taken  its  rise  in  the  Church,  but  rather  to  have 
been  manufactured  in  a  Gnostic  workshop  :  not,  indeed,  in 
any  of  those  schools  of  heresy  which  taught  that  our  Lord 
only  became  Christ  at  His  baptism  (for  to  such  teaching  the 
doctrine  was  directly  opposed  which  made  Him  exercise 
miraculous  power  in  His  childhood),  but  rather  in  the  school 
of  Docetism,  which  denied  the  true  humanity  of  our  Lord : 
for  in  these  legends  all  trace  disappears  that  He  was,  in  the 
real  truth  of  His  nature,  man.  We  may  believe  that  there 
was  a  desire  to  do  our  Lord  honour  in  the  invention  of  tales 
of  the  early  exercise  of  His  miraculous  power ;  but  if  so,  the 


198  THE   APOCRYPHAL   GOSPELS.  [xi. 

result  sadly  failed  to  correspond  to  the  design  :  for  there  is 
none  of  the  Apocryphal  Gospels  which  is  so  repulsive  to  a 
Christian  reader,  on  account  of  the  degrading  character  of 
its  representations  of  our  Lord.     In  its  pages  the  holy  child 
is  depicted  as  (to  use  Kenan's  forcible  language,  vi.  541), 
*un  gamin  omnipotent  et  omniscient,'  wielding  the  power  of 
the  Godhead  with  a  child's  waywardness  and  petulance.     It 
tells,  for  example,  that  He  was  playing  and  making  sparrows 
out  of  mud,  that  He  did  this  on  the  Sabbath,  and  that  when 
complaint  was  made  against  Him,  He  clapped  His  hands 
and  the  sparrows  took  life  and  flew  away ;  and  again,  that  He 
threw  all  the  clothes  in  a  dyer's  shop  into  a  single  vat  of  blue 
dye,  and  on  being  called  to  account  for  the  mischief  He  had 
done,  commanded  the  clothes  to  be  taken  out,  and  lo,  every 
one  was  dyed  of  the  colour  its  owner  wished.     We  are  told 
that  when  He  was  drawing  water  for  His  mother  and  hap 
pened  to  break  the  pitcher,  He  brought  the  water  safely 
home  in  the  skirt  of  His  garment;  and  that,  when  His  father, 
working  at  his  carpenter's  trade,  found  a  piece  of  wood  too 
short  for  the  place  it  was  meant  to  occupy,  the  child  gave  the 
wood  a  pull,  when  it  became  of  the  right  length.     We  learn 
to  appreciate  more  justly  the  character  of  the  miracles  related 
in  the  New  Testament  when  we  compare  them  with  those 
found  in  this  Gospel,  the  majority  of  its  stories  being  tales  of 
wonder  of  no  higher  moral  worth  than  the  prodigies  of  the 
Arabian  Nights.      But  some  of  them  are  even  malevolent 
miracles,  such  as  it  shocks  us  to  read  of  as  ascribed  to  our 
Blessed  Lord.     Boys  who  spill  the  water  out  of  little  ponds 
He  had  made  for  His  play  are  cursed  by  Him,  and  thereon 
wither  away  ;  another  boy  who  knocks  up  against  Him  in  the 
street  is  in  like  manner  cursed,  and  falls  down  dead.     The 
accusers  who  complain  to  Joseph  of  the  child's  conduct  are 
struck  with  blindness.     The  parents  of  one  of  the  children 
whose  death  He  has  caused  are  quite  reasonable  in  their 
complaint  to  Joseph :  '  Take  away  that  Jesus  of  thine  from 
this  place,  for  he  cannot  dwell  with  us  in  this  town ;  or,  at 
least,  teach  him  to  bless  and  not  to  curse.'     The  child  like 
wise  shows  Himself  from  the  first  as  omniscient  as  He  is 
omnipotent.     When  He  is  brought  to  a  master  to  be  taught 


XI.]  THE   GOSPEL   OF   ST.  THOMAS.  1 99 

His  letters,  and  is  bid  to  pronounce  Aleph,  He  refuses  to  go 
on  to  Beth  until  the  instructor  has  taught  Him  all  the  mys 
teries  of  Aleph ;  and  on  his  failing  to  do  this,  the  child  not 
only  shows  that  He  knows  all  the  letters,  but  teaches  him 
mysteries  with  regard  to  the  shape  and  powers  of  each,  which 
fill  the  hearers  with  amazement.  And  in  other  stories  He  is 
made  to  show  that  He  has  no  need  of  human  instruction. 
These  accounts  may  profitably  be  compared  with  Luke's 
statement,  that  Jesus  increased  in  wisdom  and  knowledge; 
and  with  his  narrative  of  our  Lord  sitting  in  the  midst  of  the 
doctors,  not  for  the  purpose  of  teaching  them,  as  these  stories 
would  have  it,  but  'hearing  them,  and  asking  them  questions.* 

This  Gospel,  however,  can  claim  a  very  early  parentage. 
The  work,  in  the  shape  (or  rather  shapes)  in  which  we  now 
have  it,  has,  no  doubt,  received  many  alterations  and  develop 
ments  since  the  time  of  its  first  manufacture.*  But  at  the 
beginning  of  the  third  century  a  Gospel  bearing  the  name  of 
St.  Thomas  was  known  both  to  Hippolytus  and  to  Origen ;  f 
and  Irenseus  (i.  xx.)  refers  to  the  story  just  mentioned,  con 
cerning  the  attempt  to  teach  our  Lord  His  letters,  as  a  tale  in 
circulation  among  heretics. :£  And  this  Gospel  in  its  de 
veloped  form  obtained  wide  circulation  in  the  East.  From 
such  a  Gospel  Mahomet  seems  to  have  drawn  his  concep 
tions  of  our  Saviour  (Renan,  vi.  515). 

In  the  Gospels  which  I  have  described,  the  public  minis 
terial  life  of  our  Lord  is  avoided,  and  the  inventors  profess  to 
give  details  of  His  life  before  He  entered  on  His  ministry. 
That  to  which  I  next  come  professes  to  supplement  the 
Canonical  Gospels  at  the  other  end.  It  has  been  current  under 

*  According  to  the  Stichometry  of  Nicephorus  (see  p.  178),  it  contained 
1300  sticboi,  which  would  correspond  to  a  larger  book  than  that  we  have  ; 
whence  we  may  conclude  that  the  parts  most  deeply  tainted  with  heresy 
were  cut  out  when  the  book  was  preserved  for  orthodox  use.  For  instance, 
the  words  quoted  by  Hippolytus  do  not  appear  in  our  present  text. 

f  Hippol.  Ref.  Haer.  v.  7 ;  Origen,  in  Luc.  Horn.  i. 

J  A  coincidence  with  Justin  Martyr  has  been  pointed  out.  Justin  (Dial. 
88)  states  that  our  Lord,  working  as  a  carpenter,  made  &porpa  Kal  £^70, 
words  which  occur  Ev.  Thorn.  13.  But  I  am  inclined  to  think  that  it 
was  the  pseudo-Evangelist  who  here  borrowed  from  Justin,  the  latter 
being  completely  silent  as  to  miracles  performed  by  our  Lord  in  His  child 
hood,  although  in  the  chapter  cited  they  could  hardly  fail  to  have  been 
mentioned  if  they  had  been  known  to  the  writer. 


200  THE    APOCRYPHAL   GOSPELS.  [xi. 

the  name  of  the  Gospel  of  Nicodemus  ;  but  this  name  is 
modern,  and  criticism  shows  that  the  book  is  to  be  divided 
into  two  parts,  of  different  dates  and  authorship.  The  first 
part  gives  a  full  account  of  the  trial  of  our  Lord,  and  it  seems 
to  be  identical  with  what  has  been  known  under  the  name  of 
the  Acts  of  Pilate.  Tischendorf  has  claimed  for  this  part  a 
very  high  antiquity.  Justin  Martyr  twice  refers  his  heathen 
readers  (Apol.  i.  35,  48,  and  probably  38),  in  confirmation  of 
the  things  he  tells  concerning  our  Lord's  death,  to  the  Acts 
of  Pilate,  preserved  in  their  own  records.  Tertullian  does  the 
same  (Apol.  21).  The  best  critics  suppose  that  Justin  Martyr 
did  not  himself  know  any  such  Acts  of  Pilate,  but  took  for 
granted  that  he  had  sent  his  master  an  account  of  his  doings, 
which  would  be  sure  to  be  found  in  the  public  records.  But 
it  is  also  possible  that  some  Christian  had  already  committed 
the  pious  fraud  of  fabricating  Acts  to  answer  this  description, 
and  that  Justin  Martyr  was  uncritical  enough  to  be  deceived 
by  the  fabrication.  Tischendorf  then  thinks  that  this  Gospel 
of  which  I  speak  contains  the  very  Acts  to  which  Justin  refers ; 
and  the  consequences  in  an  apologetic  point  of  view  would 
be  enormous.  For  these  Acts  are  quite  built  up  out  of  our 
four  Canonical  Gospels,  including  even  the  disputed  verses 
at  the  end  of  St.  Mark;  St.  John's  Gospel  being  the  one 
principally  used.  If,  then,  these  Acts  are  as  early  as  the  first 
half  of  the  second  century,  it  would  follow  that  all  our 
Gospels  are  far  earlier.  But  I  do  not  think  that  Tischendorf's 
contention  can  be  sustained,  and  cannot  venture  to  claim 
greater  antiquity  than  the  fourth  century  for  the  Acts  in  their 
present  form.*  The  latter  part  of  what  is  known  as  the 
Gospel  of  Nicodemus  contains  an  account  of  the  descent  of 
Christ  to  the  under  world.  Two  of  the  saints  who  were 
raised  at  His  resurrection  relate  how  they  had  been  confined 

*  The  statements  for  which  the  Acts  of  Pilate  are  appealed  to  by  Justin 
and  Tertullian  are  not  to  be  found  in  the  Gospel  under  consideration  ;  nor 
is  its  form  such  as  would  be  used  by  the  composer  of  what  were  intended 
to  pass  for  Roman  official  acts.  On  this  subject  see  Lipsius  Die  Pilatus- 
acten  and  article  '  GOSPELS  APOCRYPHAL'  in  Smith's  Dictionary  of 
Christian  Biography.  I  consider  that  a  limit  in  both  directions  to  the  age 
of  this  Gospel  is  given  by  its  adoption  of  the  date  March  25  as  that  of  the 
Saviour's  Passion.  This  is  quoted  by  Epiphanius  (Haer.  50),  whence  we 
may  conclude  that  our  Acts  are  earlier  than  A.D.  376  ;  but  the  date  itself, 


XI.]  THE    GOSPEL   OF    NICODEMUS.  201 

in  Hades  when  the  Conqueror  appeared  at  its  entrance  ;  how 
the  gates  of  brass  were  broken  and  the  prisoners  released, 
Jesus  taking  with  him  to  Paradise  the  souls  of  Adam,  Isaiah, 
John  the  Baptist,  and  the  other  holy  men  who  had  died 
before  Him.  This  story  of  a  descent  of  our  Lord  to  hell  is  of 
very  great  antiquity,  and  to  it,  no  doubt,  reference  is  made  in 
that  clause  which  in  comparatively  late  times  was  added  to 
the  Creed.  In  the  preaching  of  Thaddeus  to  Abgarus,  of 
which  I  shall  speak  later  on,  part  of  the  subject  is  said  to 
have  been  how  Jesus  was  crucified  and  descended  into  hell, 
and  burst  the  bands  which  never  had  been  broken,  and  rose 
again,  and  also  raised  with  Himself  the  dead  that  had  slept  for 
ages  ;  and  how  He  had  descended  alone,  but  ascended  with 
a  great  multitude  to  the  Father.  It  may  suffice  to  have  said 
so  much  about  Apocryphal  Gospels  of  the  supplemental  class, 
if  I  merely  add  that  these  stories,  though  formally  rejected  by 
the  Church,  supplied  abundant  materials  for  legend,  and  are 
the  source  of  many  a  name  still  current :  Dismas  and  Gestas, 
the  two  robbers  who  were  crucified  with  our  Lord  ;  Longinus, 
the  soldier  who  pierced  His  side  with  a  spear,  or,  according 
to  some  accounts,  the  centurion  who  superintended  His 
crucifixion ;  Veronica,  in  some  stories  the  woman  who  had 
the  issue  of  blood,  but,  according  to  the  popular  tale,  the 
woman  who  gave  Him  her  handkerchief  to  wipe  His  face, 
.and  who  received  on  it  His  true  likeness. 

In  passing  to  the  subject  of  heretical  Gospels,  I  may  just 
mention  that  a  few  evangelic  fragments  have  been  preserved, 
the  source  of  which  cannot  be  specified.  For  example,  Justin 
Martyr,*  Clement  of  Alexandria,  and  Hippolytus,  all  quote, 
-as  a  saying  of  our  Lord,  'In  whatever  things  I  find  you,  in 
these  will  I  judge  you;'  but  we  do  not  know  from  what  docu 
ment  they  took  the  saying.  The  doctrine  which  it  is  intended 

I  cannot  doubt,  was  first  invented  by  Hippolytus  in  the  early  part  of  the 
third  century.  His  whole  system  of  chronology  is  based  on  an  astrono 
mical  cycle,  by  means  of  which  he  imagined  himself  able  to  calculate  the 
day  of  the  Jewish  Passover  in  any  year ;  and,  according  to  this  cycle, 
March  25  would  be  the  day  in  the  year  29  which  Hippolytus  supposed  to 
be  the  year  of  the  Passion.  But  the  cycle  is  worthless,  and  March  25 
could  not  have  been  the  Passover,  or  close  to  it,  in  that  year. 

*  Justin,  Dial.  47  ;  Clem.  Alex.  Quis  dives,  40 ;  Hippol.  De  Univers. 


202  THE   APOCRYPHAL   GOSPELS.  [XI. 

to  convey  is  that  of  Ezek.  xviii.,  viz.  that  in  the  case  alike  of 
the  wicked  man  who  turns  from  his  wickedness,  or  of  the 
righteous  man  who  turns  from  his  righteousness,  judgment 
will  pass  on  the  man  according  to  the  state  in  which  death 
finds  him.  In  the  appendix  to  Westcott's  Introduction  to  the 
Study  of  the  Gospels  you  will  find  a  complete  list  of  the  non- 
Canonical  sayings  ascribed  to  our  Lord. 

It  would  be  easy  to  make  a  long  list  of  the  names  of 
Gospels  said  to  have  been  in  use  in  different  Gnostic  sects ; 
but  very  little  is  known  as  to  their  contents,  and  that  little  is 
not  such  as  to  lead  us  to  attribute  to  them  the  very  slightest 
historic  value.  The  earliest  heretical  Gospel  of  which  quota 
tions  are  numerous  is  that  'according  to  the  Egyptians,'  the 
birthplace  of  which  is  probably  truly  indicated  by  its  title, 
our  knowledge  of  it  being  chiefly  derived  from  Clement  of 
Alexandria.  Very  soon  after  the  rise  of  Christianity  there 
came  over  the  Western  world  a  great  wave  of  ascetic  teaching 
from  the  East.  If  we  can  venture  to  trace  a  very  obscure 
history,  we  may  name  India  as  the  place  where  the  move 
ment  originated,  In  that  hot  country  very  little  food  is 
absolutely  necessary  for  the  sustainment  of  life ;  and  there 
were  some  who  made  it  their  glory  to  use  as  little  as  possible, 
and  in  other  ways  to  detach  themselves  from  that  world  of 
matter  whence  it  was  believed  all  evil  had  flowed.  The 
admirers  and  imitators  of  these  men  by  degrees  spread  them 
selves  outside  the  limits  of  their  own  land.  At  any  rate,, 
whencesoever  the  teaching  was  derived,  it  became  trouble 
some  to  the  Christian  Church  in  the  very  first  years  of  its 
existence.  Scarcely  had  St.  Paul  found  himself  able  to  relax 
his  struggles  against  those  who  wanted  to  impose  on  his 
Gentile  converts  the  yoke  of  circumcision  and  the  Mosaic 
Law,  when  he  was  forced  to  do  battle  with  a  new  set  of 
opponents,  whose  cry  was  'Touch  not,  taste  not,  handle  not* 
(Col.  ii.  21),  who  'forbad  to  marry,  and  commanded  to- 
abstain  from  meats'  (i  Tim.  iv.  3).  Several  of  the  Gnostic 
sects  had  in  common  the  feature  of  Encratism ;  that  is  to 
say,  the  rejection,  as  absolutely  unlawful,  of  the  use  of 
marriage,  of  flesh  meat,  and  of  wine.  Irenaeus  (i.  28)  tells 
this  of  Saturninus,  one  of  the  earliest  of  the  Gnostics.  Their 


XI.]          THE   GOSPEL  ACCORDING    TO   THE    EGYPTIANS.  2O$ 

principles  obtained  converts  among  heathens  as  well  as 
among  Christians:  Porphyry,  for  instance,  the  great  adversary 
of  Christianity,  has  also  a  treatise  (De  Abstinentid]  against  the 
use  of  animal  food.  And  even  the  Christians  who  refused  to 
recognize  Encratism  as  a  binding  rule  were  persuaded  to 
acknowledge  it  to  be  a  more  perfect  way  of  life.  Among 
ourselves,  for  example,  vegetarianism  is  regarded  as  a  harm 
less  eccentricity;  but  in  early  times  of  Christianity,  even 
those  who  used  animal  food  themselves  came  to  think  of  the 
vegetarian  as  one  who  lived  a  higher  life,  and  approached 
more  nearly  to  Christian  perfection.  But  it  was  the  Encratite 
doctrine  of  the  absolute  unlawfulness  of  the  marriage  life 
which  provoked  the  hottest  controversies.  The  principal 
apocryphal  Acts  of  the  Apostles  proceeded  from  men  of 
Encratite  views  ;  and  in  these  the  type  of  story  is  of  constant 
recurrence,  how  an  Apostle  persuades  a  young  couple  to 
abandon  an  intended  project  of  matrimony ;  or  how  per 
secution  is  stirred  up  against  the  Christian  missionaries  by 
husbands  whose  wives  these  preachers  have  persuaded  to 
desert  them.  The  refutation  of  Encratism  is  the  subject  of 
the  third  book  of  the  Stromateis  of  Clement  of  Alexandria ; 
and  this  leads  him  to  speak  of  the  Gospel  according  to  the 
Egyptians  as  a  work  in  vogue  in  that  sect,  and  to  give  some 
extracts  from  it.  They  contrast  remarkably  with  the  simplicity 
of  the  genuine  utterances  of  our  Lord.  '  Salome  said,  "How 
long  shall  death  prevail?"  And  He  said,  "As  long  as  ye 
women  bring  forth."  And  she  said,  "Then  did  I  well  in  not 
having  children  ?"  And  He  said,  "Eat  every  herb,  but  eat 
not  that  which  hath  bitterness."  '  And  again  when  Salome 
asked  when  the  things  about  which  she  enquired  should  be 
known,  and  when  His  kingdom  should  come,  He  answered, 
*  When  ye  trample  under  foot  the  garment  of  shame,  and 
when  the  two  become  one,  and  the  outside  as  the  inside,  and 
the  male  with  the  female  neither  male  nor  female.  '* 

But  I  must  not  linger  over  heretical  writings  which  have 
no  bearing  on  modern  controversies.  I  go  on  to  speak  of  a 

*  Clem.  Alex.  Strom,  iii.  6  and  9  ;  Ex  Scr.  Theodot.  67 ;  Clem.  Rom. 
so-called  Second  Epistle,  12.  Notices  of  the  Gospel  according  to  the 
Egyptians  are  also  found  in  Hippol.  Ref.  v.  7  ;  Epiph.  Haer.  62. 


204  MARCION'S  GOSPEL.  [xi. 

document  by  means  of  which  it  has  been  attempted,  though 
with  now  confessed  ill  success,  to  establish  the  posteriority  of 
two  of  our  Canonical  Gospels  :  I  mean  the  Gospel  of  Marcion. 
Marcion,  who  came  forward  as  a  teacher  about  A.D.  140,  is 
usually  classed  with  the  Gnostics ;  yet  he  deserves  a  place  by 
himself,  for  he  does  not  appear  to  have  derived  his  heretical 
notions  from  these  propagators  of  a  medley  of  Christian, 
Jewish,  and  heathen  ideas,  but  to  have  worked  out  his 
system  for  himself.  As  the  son  of  a  bishop,  he  had  received 
a  Christian  education ;  but  he  was  perplexed  by  that  great 
problem  of  the  origin  of  evil,  which  has  been  a  puzzle  to  so 
many.  He  took,  as  his  principle  to  start  with,  the  Gospel 
maxim,  '  A  good  tree  cannot  bring  forth  corrupt  fruit.'  It 
followed  then,  he  concluded,  that  the  Maker  of  the  universe 
cannot  be  good.  But  the  God  of  the  Old  Testament  claims 
to  be  the  Maker  of  the  universe.  This  God  also  threatens  to 
inflict  punishment :  in  other  words,  to  inflict  suffering — to  do 
evil.  We  must  then  believe  in  two  Gods — the  God  of  the  Old 
Testament,  a  just  God,  the  Creator,  who  alone  was  known  to 
the  Jews  ;  and  a  good  God,  who  was  first  revealed  by  Christ. 
For  Christ  Himself  said,  '  No  man  has  known  the  Father  but 
the  Son,  and  he  to  whom  the  Son  will  reveal  him.'  Marcion 
drew  out  in  antitheses  the  contradictions  which  he  imagined 
he  found  between  the  Old  Testament  and  the  New,  and  be 
tween  the  Old  Testament  and  itself.  But  how  was  this 
disparagement  of  the  Old  Testament  to  be  reconciled  with 
the  New  Testament  itself  ?  In  the  first  place,  Marcion  has 
to  sacrifice  all  the  original  Apostles  as  unfaithful  preachers 
of  the  truth.  Paul  alone  is  to  be  trusted,  and  even  Paul 
must  be  expurgated.  We  have  had  examples  in  our  modern 
*  tendency '  critics  of  the  Synoptic  Gospels,  that  it  is  easy  to 
establish  that  a  document  teaches  anything  you  please  if  you 
are  at  liberty  to  cut  out  of  it  everything  that  contradicts  your 
theory.  So  Marcion  dealt  with  his  Apostolicon,  which  con 
sisted  of  ten  Epistles  of  St.  Paul.  He  had  his  Gospel  also, 
with  which  he  coupled  no  author's  name,  but  which  can  be 
proved  to  be  St.  Luke's  Gospel,  with  every  part  cut  out  which 
directly  contradicted  Marcion's  theory.  Tertullian  devotes  a 
whole  book  to  Marcion's  Gospel,  going  regularly  through  it, 


xi.]  MARCION'S  GOSPEL.  205 

and  undertaking  to  show  that  the  heretic  can  be  refuted  from 
his  own  Gospel.  Epiphanius  also  notes  at  considerable  length 
the  differences  between  Marcion's  Gospel  and  St.  Luke's.  And 
from  these  and  other  minor  sources  we  can,  with  tolerable 
completeness,  restore  Marcion's  Gospel. 

Now,  it  happens  in  one  or  two  cases  that  readings  (not 
connected  with  Marcion's  peculiar  theory)  which  Tertullian 
reprobates  as  corruptions  of  Marcion's  are  still  to  be  found  in 
some  of  the  oldest  MSS.  of  the  Gospels,  and  we  have  reason  to 
think  that  in  these  cases  Tertullian  was  in  error  in  thinking 
his  own  copy  right,  and  Marcion  wrong.*  Tertullian  also 
blames  Marcion  for  entitling  Paul's  Epistle  to  the  Ephesians 
as  to  the  Laodiceans  ;  but  it  happens  that  in  one  or  two  of 
the  oldest  MSS.  the  words  ei/  'E^eo-w  are  absent  from  the 
address  of  that  Epistle  ;  and  many  critics  think  that  Marcion 
was  right,  and  that  this  was  indeed  the  letter  which  the 
Colossians  were  directed  by  Paul  to  procure  from  Laodicea. 
Finally,  Marcion  is  blamed  by  Tertullian  for  not  including  in 
his  Apostolicon  the  three  Pastoral  Epistles  of  St.  Paul.  But, 
as  we  shall  find  in  another  lecture,  the  sceptical  school  of 
the  present  day  are  of  the  same  opinion,  and  gladly  claim 
Marcion  as  a  witness  in  their  favour.  So  the  theory  suggests 
itself — it  was  only  through  ignorance  and  prejudice  that 
Tertullian  and  other  Fathers  accused  Marcion  of  mutilating 
the  Gospels :  they  thought  because  his  Gospel  was  shorter 
than  theirs  that  he  must  have  mutilated  the  Gospel ;  but  the 
truth  was,  that  he,  living  in  the  very  beginning  of  the  century 
at  the  end  of  which  they  lived,  was  in  possession  of  the  real 
original  Gospel  before  it  had  been  corrupted  by  additions. 
I  have  told  you  how  it  has  been  attempted  to  recover  a 

*  Orthodox  scribes  would  certainly  not  adopt  readings  invented  by 
Marcion,  so  that  any  corrupt  readings  in  which  MSS.  agree  with  Marcion 
must  have  crept  into  the  text  before  his  time.  Now,  in  the  newly- 
arrived  volume  of  his  History  of  the  N.  T.  Canon,  Zahn  maintains  (p.  675) 
that  Marcion  can  be  shown  to  have  used  a  text  of  Luke  corrupted  by 
assimilation  to  Matthew  and  Mark  ;  so  that  Marcion  not  only  exhibits 
acquaintance  with  these  Gospels,  but  also  is  proved  to  have  lived  at  a 
time  when  the  three  Gospels  had  already  circulated  so  long  together  that 
scribes  had  begun  to  be  influenced  in  their  copying  of  one  by  their 
habitual  knowledge  of  the  others.  There  has  not  been  time  for  me  to 
make  an  independent  examination  of  Zahn's  proofs,  the  full  exhibition  of 
which  he  has  reserved  for  an  Appendix  not  yet  published. 


2o6  MARCION'S  GOSPEL.  [xi. 

Hebrew  anti-Pauline  Gospel  by  cutting  out  of  St.  Matthew 
everything  that  recognizes  the  calling  of  the  Gentiles.  That, 
after  all,  is  unsatisfactory  work,  there  being  no  means  of 
verifying  that  such  a  Gospel  as  is  thus  arrived  at  was  ever 
current.  But  it  seems  a  fine  thing  to  recover  the  opposition 
Gospel — a  Pauline,  anti-Jewish  Gospel — and  to  have  the 
evidence  of  Marcion  that  this  was  really  current  at  the  begin 
ning  of  the  second  century.  On  this  matter  our  sceptical 
opponents  were  left  to  puzzle  out  the  matter  for  themselves 
with  little  help  from  the  orthodox,  who  either  took  no  notice 
of  what  seemed  to  them  a  wild  theory,  or  else  exclaimed 
against  it  without  any  detailed  attempt  to  refute  it.  The 
falsity  of  the  theory  was  exposed  by  persons  very  willing  to 
believe  in  it ;  indeed  the  death-blow  to  the  theory  was  given 
by  Volkmar,  whose  name  I  have  had  occasion  to  mention  to 
you  in  connexion  with  some  very  wild  speculations.  He  and 
others  reconstructed  the  Marcionite  Gospel  from  the  Patristic 
testimony,  and  comparing  it  with  our  St.  Luke,  asked  them 
selves,  Which  has  the  greater  claim  to  originality  ?  It  had  to 
be  borne  in  mind  that  Marcion's  doctrine  went  far  beyond 
Paul's :  that  while  Paul  contended  against  Jewish  exclusive- 
ness,  and  wished  to  put  Gentiles  on  the  same  level,  it  is 
certain  that  he  was  not  hostile  to  the  Jews  and  their  religion, 
in  the  way  that  Marcion  was.  Well,  the  result  of  examina 
tion  was,  that  the  features  that  distinguished  Marcion's  Gos 
pel  from  our  St.  Luke  were  clearly  not  Pauline  but  Marcionite; 
and,  on  mere  doctrinal  grounds,  these  critics  arrived  at  the 
conclusion  that  Marcion's  Gospel  was  the  mutilation,  and 
not  Luke's  the  amplification.  Their  arguments  convinced 
their  opponents,  and  the  figment  that  Marcion's  Gospel  was 
the  original  St.  Luke  may  now  be  regarded  as,  by  the  con 
sent  of  all  competent  judges,  quite  exploded  by  criticism. 
The  author  of  Supernatural  Religion,  however,  thought  proper 
to  revive  this  moribund  theory,  and  this  led  to  a  new  exami 
nation  of  it  by  Dr.  Sanday.*  He  took  the  passages  which 
Marcion  owned  as  belonging  to  the  original  Gospel,  and 
minutely  examined  the  style  and  the  vocabulary,  comparing 

*  See  his  Gospels  in  the  Second  Century.     The  chapter  on  Marcion  had 
previously  been  published  as  an  article  in  the  Fortnightly  Review. 


XL]  MARCION'S  GOSPEL.  207 

them  with  the  language  of  the  passages  which  Marcion  re 
jected;  and  the  result  was  so  decisive  a  proof  of  unity  of 
authorship,  that  the  author  of  Supernatural  Religion,  though 
not  apt  to  confess  defeat,  has  owned  himself  convinced,  and 
has  abandoned  this  part  of  his  argument.  But  this  abandon 
ment  is  really  an  abandonment  of  great  part  of  his  book. 
For  what  is  the  use  of  contending  that  Justin  Martyr  and 
others  who  lived  still  later  in  the  second  century  were  igno 
rant  of  St.  Luke's  Gospel,  if  it  has  to  be  owned  that  Marcion, 
who  wrote  quite  early  in  the  century,  was  acquainted  with 
that  Gospel,  and  attached  to  it  such  value  that  he  joined  it 
with  the  Epistles  of  St.  Paul,  making  it  the  basis  of  his  entire 
system  ? 

Before  I  part  with  Marcion  I  ought  to  notice  another  use 
that  has  been  made  of  his  attempt  to  make  a  new  Gospel. 
The  attempt  to  place  Marcion  before  Luke  may  be  regarded 
as  having  utterly  collapsed ;  but  it  has  been  thought  that 
ground  might  be  gained  for  inferring  that  Marcion  must  have 
come  before  the  fourth  Gospel.  It  is  said,  Marcion's  object 
was  to  get  possession  of  a  strong  anti-Jewish,  ultra-Pauline 
Gospel.  The  fact  that  he  could  do  nothing  better  than  take 
St.  Luke's  Gospel  and  modify  it  for  his  purpose  by  plentiful 
excisions  shows,  it  has  been  said,  that  he  knew  nothing  of 
St.  John's  Gospel,  which  would  have  exactly  answered  his 
purpose.  But  nothing  can  be  more  inconsiderate  than  this 
off-hand  criticism.  If  St.  John's  Gospel  can  be  called  anti- 
Jewish,  it  is  not  so  in  the  sense  that  Marcion  is.  It  makes 
no  opposition  between  the  God  of  the  Old  Testament  and 
that  of  the  New ;  on  the  contrary,  it  so  connects  the  two  dis 
pensations  that  Marcion  would  have  found  even  more  trouble 
necessary  to  adapt  the  fourth  Gospel  to  his  purpose  than  that 
which  he  has  spent  on  the  third.  *  His  own  received  Him 
not,'  says  St.  John  in  the  first  few  verses :  that  is  to  say,  the 
Logos  is  identified  with  the  God  of  the  Jews,  and  claims  that 
nation  as  His  own  people.  The  one  verse  (iv.  22)  in  the 
discourse  with  the  woman  of  Samaria — *  Salvation  is  of  the 
Jews' — has  been  an  insuperable  stumbling-block  to  all  critics 
who  would  exaggerate  the  anti-Jewish  tendency  of  this  Gos 
pel.  The  Old  Testament  writers  are  appealed  to  as  the  best 
witnesses  for  Christ :  '  Had  ye  believed  Moses  ye  would  have 


2o8  MARCION'S  GOSPEL.  [xi. 

believed  me,  for  he  wrote  of  me'  (v.  46),  'Abraham  rejoiced 
to  see  my  day'  (viii.  56),  'These  things  said  Esaias  when 
he  saw  his  glory  and  spake  of  him'  (xii.  41),  'Ye  search  the 
Scriptures  and  they  are  they  which  testify  of  me'  (v.  39). 
The  temple  which  the  Jews  had  built  for  the  worship  of  their 
God,  Jesus  claims  as  his  Father's  house :  '  Make  not  my 
Father's  house  a  house  of  merchandise '  (ii.  16).  The  Old 
Testament  is  full  of  types  of  his  work  on  earth  :  the  brazen 
serpent  (iii.  14),  the  manna  in  the  wilderness  (vi.  32),  the 
Paschal  Lamb  (xix.  36).  Great  importance  is  attached  to  the 
testimony  of  John  the  Baptist,  who,  according  to  Marcion, 
like  the  older  prophets,  did  not  know  the  true  Christ;  and 
if  there  had  been  nothing  else,  the  story  of  the  miracle  of 
turning  water  into  wine  would  have  condemned  this  Gospel 
in  Marcion's  eyes.  We  must  also  remember  that  to  accept  a 
Gospel  ascribed  to  the  Apostle  John  would  have  been  at 
variance  with  the  whole  system  of  Marcion,  who  had  thought 
himself  warranted  by  Gal.  ii.  14  to  infer  that  the  original 
Apostles  did  not  walk  '  uprightly  according  to  the  truth  of 
the  Gospel,'  and  therefore  could  not  consistently  use  either 
the  Gospels  of  Matthew  or  John,  or  that  which  was  believed 
to  have  been  derived  from  Peter  (see  Tert.  Adv.  Marc.  iv.  3).. 
I  own,  then,  that  when  I  see  one  sceptical  writer  after 
another  building  an  argument  on  the  assumption  that  if 
Marcion  had  known  the  fourth  Gospel  he  would  have  made 
it  the  text-book  of  his  system,  I  cannot  but  ask  myself, 
Which  is  it  that  these  critics  have  never  read — the  Gospel 
of  St.  John,  or  the  authorities  which  describe  the  system  of 
Marcion  ?  You  will  find  that  the  fourth  Gospel  so  swarms 
with  recognitions  of  the  identity  of  the  God  of  the  Jews  with 
the  Father  of  our  Lord,  and  of  the  authority  of  the  Old 
Testament  writers  as  testifying  to  Him,  that  Marcion  would 
have  had  work  to  do  on  every  chapter  before  he  could  fit  it 
to  his  purpose  —  a  task  which  he  was  under  no  temptation 
to  undertake,  since,  as  we  shall  presently  show,  the  fourth 
Gospel  was  never  intended  to  stand  alone,  but  was  written 
for  those  who  had  an  independent  knowledge  of  the  facts 
of  our  Saviour's  life :  so  that  no  modification  of  the  fourth 
Gospel  would  have  enabled  Marcion  to  dispense  with  another 
Gospel. 


(     209     ) 


XII. 


THE    JOHANNINE    BOOKS, 


PART    I. 

THE    FOURTH    GOSPEL. 

I  COME  at  length  to  consider  the  Fourth  Gospel,  which 
has  been  the  subject  of  special  assaults.  In  connexion 
with  it  I  will  discuss  the  other  Johannine  writings,  the 
Epistles  and  the  Apocalypse.  I  do  not  think  it  necessary 
to  spend  much  time  on  the  proofs  that  the  First  Epistle 
and  the  Gospel  are  the  work  of  the  same  writer.  There 
are  numerous  striking  verbal  coincidences  between  them, 
of  which  you  will  find  a  list  in  the  introductions  to  the 
commentaries  on  the  Epistle  by  the  Bishop  of  Derry  in 
the  '  Speaker's  Commentary,'  and  by  Professor  Westcott 
in  a  separate  volume.  I  give  only  a  few  examples  of  phrases 
common  to  both :  '  That  your  joy  may  be  full '  (tW  fj  xaP<* 
v/xwv  y  7T€7rA?7pa>/x,ei/>7,  i  John  i.  4  ;  John  xvi.  20) :  '  Walketh  in 
darkness  and  knoweth  not  whither  he  goeth '  (lv  rfj  O-KOTLO. 
TrepiTrarct,  /cat  OVK  olSc  TTOV  vTrayei,  I  John  ii.  1 1  ;  John  xii.  35)  ; 
*  Have  passed  from  death  unto  life '  (/A€Ta/2e/2?7/<a/Aev  e*  TOW 
Oavdrov  eis  T^V  £(t)ryv,  i  John  iii.  14 ;  John  v.  24)  ;  ytyvcocrKo/x,€v 
TOV  AXyQivdv  (i  John  v.  24;  John  xvii.  3).  Moreover,  the  Epistle 
gives  to  our  Lord  the  titles  'only  begotten'  (iv.  9  ;  John  i.  14) 
and  'Saviour  of  the  world'  (iv.  14;  John  iv.  42,  see  also  iii.  17). 
And  remember  that  this  phrase,  'Saviour  of  the  world,'  so  fami 
liar  to  us,  conveyed  an  idea  novel  and  startling  to  the  Jewish 
mind  of  that  day.  I  also  take  notice  of  the  mention  of  '  the 

p 


210  THE   JOHANNINE    BOOKS.  [xil. 

water  and  the  blood*  in  the  Epistle  (v.  6),  which  we  can 
scarcely  fail  to  connect  with  St.  John's  history  of  the  Pas 
sion.  But  besides  these,  and  several  other,  examples  of 
phrases  common  to  both  works,  there  is  such  a  general 
resemblance  of  style,  thought,  and  expression,  that  critics 
of  most  opposite  schools  have  agreed  in  recognizing  com 
mon  authorship. 

I  think,  therefore,  that  it  would  be  waste  of  time  if  I  were 
to  enumerate  and  answer  the  points  of  objection  to  this  view 
made  by  Davidson  and  others  of  his  school,  whose  work 
seems  to  me  no  more  than  laborious  trifling.  These  micro 
scopic  critics  forget  that  it  is  quite  as  uncritical  to  be  blind 
to  resemblances  as  it  is  to  overlook  points  of  difference. 
And  there  cannot  be  a  more  false  canon  of  criticism  than 
that  a  man  who  has  written  one  work  will,  when  writing  a 
second,  introduce  no  ideas  and  make  use  of  no  modes  of 
expression  that  are  not  to  be  found  in  the  first.  On  the 
contrary,  a  writer  may  be  pronounced  very  barren  indeed 
if  he  exhausts  all  his  ideas  and  expends  all  his  vocabulary 
on  one  production.  I  am  sure  that  any  unprejudiced  judge 
would  decide  that  while  the  minute  points  of  difference  that 
have  been  pointed  out  between  the  Gospel  and  the  First 
Epistle  are  no  more  than  must  be  expected  in  two  produc 
tions  of  the  same  writer,  the  general  resemblance  is  such, 
that  a  man  must  be  devoid  of  all  faculty  of  critical  percep 
tion  who  cannot  discern  the  proofs  of  common  authorship. 

The  main  reason  for  denying  the  common  authorship  is 
that,  if  it  be  granted,  it  demolishes  certain  theories  about 
St.  John's  Gospel.  For  instance,  one  of  the  doctrines  of  the 
Tubingen  school  was,  that  the  fourth  Evangelist  was  so 
spiritual  that  he  did  not  believe  in  a  visible  second  coming 
of  Christ :  '  Instead  of  Christ's  second  coming  we  have  the 
Spirit's  mission  to  the  disciples.  Jesus  comes  again  only  in 
the  Comforter.  Future  and  present  are  comprehended  in  the 
one  idea  of  eternal  life  whose  possession  is  present.  There 
is,  therefore,  no  future  judgment.'  This  doctrine  about 
St.  John  is  rather  inconveniently  pressed  by  the  passage, 
John  v.  28,  '  The  hour  is  coming  in  the  which  all  that  are  in  the 
graves  shall  hear  the  voice  of  the  Son  of  Man  and  shall  come 


XII.]  THE    GOSPEL   AND   THE    FIRST   EPISTLE.  211 

forth  :  they  that  have  done  good  unto  the  resurrection  of  life, 
and  they  that  have  done  evil  unto  the  resurrection  of  damna 
tion.'  Scholten  coolly  disposes  of  this  troublesome  passage 
by  setting  it  down  as  an  interpolation.  It  is  equally  necessary 
to  reject  the  2ist  chapter,  which  contains  the  words  (v.  22), 
4  If  I  will  that  he  tarry  till  I  come.'  At  any  rate  the  second 
coming  is  the  sure  hope  of  the  Apostle  when  he  wrote  the 
Epistle.  It  is  then  '  the  last  time  ;'  the  disciples  are  exhorted 
to  live  so  that  they  may  have  confidence  and  not  be  ashamed 
before  Him  at  His  coming  (ii.  18,  28).  Yet  the  Epistle  uses 
just  the  same  language  as  the  Gospel  about  eternal  life  as  a 
present  possession:  'We  have  passed  from  death  unto  life 
because  we  love  the  brethren.'  In  this,  and  in  other  in 
stances  which  I  need  not  detail  to  you,  the  arguments  against 
the  common  authorship  show  only  how  ill-founded  are  the 
critic's  theories  about  the  doctrine  of  the  Evangelist — theories 
chiefly  founded  on  his  not  having  said  certain  things,  which, 
however,  when  he  is  allowed  to  speak  for  himself  a  little 
more,  he  does  say. 

As  to  the  external  history  of  the  First  Epistle,  I  merely 
mention  that  it  is  quoted  by  Polycarp  (c.  7),  by  Papias 
(Euseb.  in.  39),  by  Irenaeus,  in.  xvi.,;Vi  and  repeatedly  by 
Clement  of  Alexandria  (e.  g.  Strom,  n.  15)!  and  Tertullian 
(e.g.  Adv.  Prax.  15;  De  Pudic.  19).  In  the  Muratorian 
Fragment  it  is  spoken  of,  not,  in  what  it  might  seem  its 
proper  place,  among  the  Epistles,  but  immediately  in  con 
nexion  with  the  Gospel  (see  the  passage  quoted,  p.  48). 
When  the  list  of  Epistles  is  given,  only  two  of  St.  John  are 
mentioned.  The  fact  that  in  this  document  the  First  Epistle 
is  detached  from  the  other  two  and  connected  with  the 
Gospel  is  ably  made  use  of  by  Bishop  Lightfoot  (Contem 
porary  Review ',  October,  1875,  p.  835),  in  confirmation  of  a 

*  The  language  of  Irenseus  suggests  that  he  read  the  Second  Epistle  as 
if  it  were  part  of  the  First.  In  the  passage  here  referred  to,  he  introduces 
his  quotation  with  the  words  'Johannes  in  epistola  sua,'  as  if  he  knew  but 
one.  A  little  further  on  he  quotes  a  passage  from  the  Second  Epistle  with 
the  words  « in  praedicta  epistola.'  He  had  also  quoted  the  Second  Epistle, 
I.  xvi. 

t  The  form  of  quotation  ey  rfj  peifrvi  eiriffroKr,  implies  also  an  acknow 
ledgment  of  the  Second  Epistle. 

P  2 


212  THE   JOHANNINE   BOOKS.  [xil. 

theory  of  his,  that  the  First  Epistle  was  originally  published 
with  the  Gospel  as  a  kind  of  commendatory  postcript.* 

Augustine,  followed  by  other  Latin  authorities,  calls  this 
the  Epistle  to  the  Parthians  (Quaest.  Evangel,  n.  39).  It  has 
been  conjectured  that  this  may  have  been  a  corruption  of  a 
Greek  title  wpos  7rap0eVovs.  The  ground  is  not  very  con 
clusive,  namely,  that  Clement  of  Alexandria  tells  us  (Hypotyp. 
p.  ion,  Potter's  edition)  that  the  Second  Epistle  of  St.  John 
was  known  under  this  title.  Gieseler  plausibly  conjectures 
that  in  both  cases  a  corruption  took  place  of  the  title  TOV 
irapOfvov,  which  was  commonly  given  to  John  in  early  times, 
and  which  may  have  been  added  to  the  inscriptions  of  the 
Epistles. 

The  fourth  Gospel,  as  I  have  said,  has  been  the  subject  of 
far  more  serious  assaults  than  the  others.  If  the  others  are 
allowed  to  have  been  published  soon  after  the  destruction  of 
Jerusalem,  the  fourth  is  not  assigned  an  earlier  date  than  the 
latter  half  of  the  second  century.  Such,  at  least,  was  Baur's 
theory  ;  but  in  the  critical  sifting  it  has  undergone,  the  date 
of  the  fourth  Gospel  has  been  receding  further  and  further 
back  in  the  second  century,  so  that  now  hardly  any  critic 
with  any  pretension  to  fairness  puts  it  later  than  the  very 
beginning  of  that  century,  if  not  the  end  of  the  first  century, 
which  comes  very  close  to  the  date  assigned  it  by  those  who 
believe  in  the  Johannine  authorship. 

In  the  value  he  attaches  to  the  fourth  Gospel,  Renan  is  a 
singular  exception  among  sceptical  writers.  He  is  ready 
enough  to  grant  the  antiquity  of  our  documents,  though 
claiming  for  himself  an  intuitive  sagacity  which  can  dis 
criminate  the  true  words  and  actions  of  Jesus  from  what  may 
have  been  added  by  the  piety  of  the  second  generation  of 
Christians.  To  St.  John's  Gospel  Renan  attaches  particular 
value.  The  discourses,  indeed,  of  Jesus,  recorded  by  St.  John, 
are  not  to  Renan's  taste,  and  he  rejects  them  with  depreci 
ating  epithets  which  I  need  not  repeat ;  but  the  account  given 
of  the  life  of  Jesus  he  treats  as  preferable,  in  a  multitude  of 


*  On  the  attestation  borne  by  the  First  Epistle  to  the  Gospel,  it  is- 
particularly  worth  while  to  consult  Hug's  Introduction,  n.  245. 


XII.]  THE    FOURTH    GOSPEL.  213 

cases,  to  the  narrative  of  the  Synoptic  Evangelists.  In  par 
ticular  he  declares  that  the  last  month  of  the  life  of  Jesus  can 
only  be  explained  by  St.  John,  and  that  a  multitude  of  traits 
unintelligible  in  the  Synoptic  Gospels  assume  in  St.  John's 
narrative  consistency  and  probability.  He  is  the  more  ready 
to  attribute  this  Gospel  to  St.  John  because  he  imagines  that 
he  finds  in  it  a  design  unduly  to  exalt  that  Apostle,  and  to 
show  that  on  different  occasions  he  was  honoured  by  Jesus 
with  the  first  place.  His  theory  is,  that  John  in  his  old  age 
having  read  the  evangelic  narratives  then  in  circulation,  re 
marked  in  them  several  inaccuracies,  and  was  besides  annoyed 
at  finding  that  only  a  secondary  place  in  the  history  of  Christ 
was  assigned  to  himself ;  that  he  then  began  to  dictate  a 
multitude  of  things  which  he  knew  better  than  the  others, 
and  with  the  intention  of  showing  that  on  many  occasions 
where  Peter  alone  was  spoken  of  in  those  narratives,  he  had 
figured  with  him  and  before  him.  These  precious  notes 
Renan  supposes  to  have  been  distorted  by  the  mistakes  or 
carelessness  of  John's  disciples.  In  order  to  reconcile  his 
belief  in  the  antiquity  of  the  Gospels  with  his  rejection  of 
their  historic  authority,  whenever  it  is  convenient  for  him  to 
do  so,  Renan  imagines  a  case  of  a  life  and  recollections  of 
Napoleon  written  separately  by  three  or  four  soldiers  of  the 
Empire  thirty  or  forty  years  after  the  death  of  their  chief. 
It  is  clear,  he  says,  their  narratives  would  present  numerous 
errors  and  contradictions  :  one  would  put  Wagram  before 
Marengo  ;  another  would  write  without  hesitation  that  Napo 
leon  turned  out  the  government  of  Robespierre  ;  a  third 
would  omit  expeditions  of  the  highest  importance.  But  one 
thing  would  stand  out  clearly  in  these  artless  notes,  and  that 
is,  the  character  of  the  hero  and  the  impression  he  made  on 
those  about  him.  And  in  this  point  of  view  such  popular 
histories  would  be  worth  far  more  than  a  formal  and  official 
one. 

But  in  this  comparison  one  point  of  essential  difference 
is  overlooked.  Three  or  four  soldiers  of  the  Empire  would 
be  competent  witnesses  to  such  facts  as  lay  within  their  range 
of  observation.  They  would  be  incompetent  witnesses  to  the 
order  and  design  of  battles,  changes  of  ministry,  plans  of 


214  THE    JOHANNINE    BOOKS.  [xil. 

statesmanship,  and  other  things  out  of  their  sphere.  If  they 
meddled  with  such  matters  in  their  stories  we  should  not  be 
surprised  to  find  errors  and  contradictions.  But  to  have  a 
real  comparison  to  lives  of  our  Lord  written  by  Apostles,  we 
should  imagine  lives  of  Napoleon  written  by  three  or  four  of 
his  marshals.  In  that  case  a  statement  concerning  his  battles 
in  which  all  agreed  would  justly  be  regarded  as  of  the  highest 
authority.  Take  the  account  of  any  of  our  Lord's  miracles, 
and  especially  that  of  the  Resurrection.  We  ask,  Is  the 
narrator  telling  a  wilful  lie  ?  'No'  is  answered  by  almost  all 
our  antagonists.  Well,  then,  could  he  be  mistaken?  'Yes/ 
answer  Strauss  and  his  school.  'He  lived  a  long  time  after 
the  event,  and  only  honestly  repeated  the  stories  which  had 
then  got  into  circulation  about  the  founder  of  his  religion.' 
But  if  we  admit,  as  Renan  in  his  first  edition  was  willing  to 
do,  that  the  Gospel  is  the  work  of  an  Apostle  and  an  eye 
witness,  the  possibility  of  a  mistake  can  no  longer  be  asserted 
with  any  plausibility.  I  think,  therefore,  that  Renan's  re 
viewers  of  the  sceptical  school  were  quite  right  in  regarding 
him  as  having  made  a  most  dangerous  concession  in  admitting 
that  John's  Gospel  has  the  authority  of  the  Apostle  of  that 
name.  The  authority,  I  say,  for  Renan  does  not  now  at  least 
maintain  that  it  was  actually  written  by  John  himself,  but 
rather  that  it  was  the  work  of  a  disciple  who  bore  to  John 
the  same  relation  which,  according  to  Papias,  Mark  bore  to 
Peter. 

It  remains  for  us,  therefore,  to  examine  the  arguments 
which  are  urged  against  the  Johannine  authorship.  Now, 
with  respect  to  external  evidence,  I  have  already  expressed 
my  belief  that  John's  Gospel  stands  on  quite  as  high  a  level 
of  authority  as  any  of  the  others.  Suffice  it  now  to  say  that 
if  it  be  a  forgery  it  has  had  the  most  wonderful  success  ever 
forgery  had ;  at  once  received  not  only  by  the  orthodox,  but 
by  the  most  discordant  heretics — by  Judaizing  Christians, 
Gnostics,  Mystics — all  of  whom  owned  the  necessity  of  re 
conciling  their  speculations  with  the  sayings  of  this  Gospel. 

Of  the  reasons  why  its  apostolic  origin  has  been  dis 
believed,  I  will  place  first  that  which  I  believe  to  have  had 
the  greatest  influence,  and  to  have  been  the  cause  why  other 


xii.]  OUR  LORD'S  SELF-ASSERTION.  215 

reasons  have  been  sought  for,  namely,  the  impossibility  of 
reconciling  the  Gospel  with  the  denial  of  our  Lord's  Divinity. 
Critics  now-a-days  trust  far  more  to  their  own  powers  of 
divination  than  to  historical  testimony.  It  is  an  assumed 
principle  with  them  that  there  can  be  no  miracle ;  that  Jesus 
was  a  man  like  others ;  that  he  must  have  been  so  regarded 
by  his  disciples ;  that  the  opinion  that  he  was  more  than  man 
could  only  have  gradually  grown  up ;  that,  therefore,  a  book 
in  which  the  doctrine  of  Christ's  Divinity  is  highly  developed 
bears  on  the  face  of  it  the  marks  of  late  date.  This  is  a  pre 
possession  against  which  it  is  hard  to  struggle ;  the  forms  of 
scientific  inquiry  may  be  gone  through,  but  the  sentence  has 
been  passed  before  the  evidence  has  been  looked  at.  What 
ever  be  the  pretext  on  which  the  book  is  condemned,  the  real 
secret  of  the  hostility  to  it  is  the  assumption  that  a  belief 
in  our  Lord's  Godhead  could  not  have  existed  among  the 
Apostles  who  had  companied  with  Him  during  His  life,  and 
that  it  must  have  grown  up  by  degrees  among  the  new 
generation  of  Christians  who  had  not  known  our  Lord  after 
the  flesh,  and  who  merely  reverenced  in  their  ideal  Christ  a 
personification  of  all  that  is  pure  and  noble  in  humanity. 
St.  John's  Gospel,  if  admitted  as  of  authority,  would  make 
Christ  from  the  first  claim  and  receive  a  homage  to  which  no 
mere  man  is  entitled.  There  was  a  time  when  Socinians 
endeavoured  to  reconcile  their  system  with  the  evangelical 
records,  but  that  attempt  is  now  abandoned  as  hopeless,  and 
accordingly,  the  overthrow  of  at  least  St.  John's  Gospel  be 
comes  a  necessity. 

Strauss,  on  whose  principles  the  question  whether  Jesus 
was  more  than  man  cannot  even  claim  discussion,  argues  that 
'Jesus  in  John's  Gospel  claims  to  have  a  recollection  of  a 
divine  existence  reaching  back  to  a  period  before  the  creation 
of  the  world.  Such  a  recollection  is  inconceivable  to  us, 
because  in  accredited  history  no  instance  of  it  has  occurred. 
If  anyone  should  speak  of  having  such  a  recollection,  we 
should  consider  him  as  a  fool  or  an  impostor.  But  since  it  is 
difficult  to  believe  that  Jesus  was  either  of  these,  we  cannot 
allow  that  the  words  attributed  to  him  were  really  spoken  by 
him.'  Similarly  Strauss  is  offended  with  the  whole  tone  of 


2l6  THE   JOHANNINE    BOOKS.  [XII. 

the  language  of  Jesus  about  Himself,  as  reported  in  this 
Gospel,  the  manner  in  which  He  insists  on  His  divinity,  puts 
His  own  person  forward,  and  makes  adherence  to  Himself 
the  first  duty  of  His  disciples.  '  The  speeches  of  Jesus  about 
himself  in  this  Gospel,'  says  Strauss,  'are  an  uninterrupted 
doxology  only  translated  out  of  the  second  person  into  the 
first,  from  the  form  of  address  to  another  into  an  utterance 
about  a  self.  When  an  enthusiastic  disciple  calls  his  master 
(supposed  to  have  been  raised  to  heaven)  the  light  of  the 
world — when  he  says  of  him  that  he  who  has  seen  him  has 
seen  the  Father,  that  he  is  God  Himself  we  excuse  the 
faithful  worshipper  such  extravagances.  But  when  he  goes 
so  far  as  the  fourth  Evangelist,  and  puts  the  utterances  of  his 
own  pious  enthusiasm  into  the  mouth  of  Jesus,  in  the  form  of 
Jesus's  utterances  about  himself,  he  does  him  a  very  perilous 
service.' 

I  admit  it ;  a  very  perilous  service  if  Jesus  be  no  more  than 
man.  Assuredly,  in  that  case,  we  cannot  admire  him  as  a 
faultless  man.  We  must  regard  him,  to  speak  the  plain  truth, 
as  one  who,  however  excellent,  disfigured  his  real  merits  by 
his  own  exaggerated  pretensions,  who  habitually  used  inflated 
if  not  blasphemous  language  respecting  the  dignity  of  his 
own  person :  such  language,  in  short,  as  naturally  led  to  the 
consequence  that  he,  though  man,  came  to  be  worshipped  as 
God.  However,  the  question  with  which  we  are  immediately 
concerned  is  not  whether  Jesus  possessed  superhuman  power 
and  authority,  but  whether  He  claimed  it.  The  self-assertion 
of  Jesus  in  the  fourth  Gospel  can  reasonably  be  made  a  plea 
for  discrediting  the  authority  of  the  writer,  only  if  it  can  be 
made  out  that  such  language  on  our  Lord's  part  is  incon 
sistent  with  what  is  elsewhere  told  of  Him.  And  this  is  what 
is  asserted.  It  is  said  that  in  the  Synoptic  Gospels  Jesus  is 
only  a  moral  reformer,  anxious  to  give  to  the  commands  of 
the  law  their  highest  spiritual  meaning,  and  rejecting  the 
evasions  by  which  a  compliance  with  their  letter  was  made  to 
excuse  a  breach  of  their  spirit.  In  the  fourth  Gospel,  on  the 
contrary,  Jesus  puts  forward  Himself.  He  is  the  Way,  the 
Truth,  and  the  Life,  the  only  door  by  which  man  can  have 
access  to  God. 


xii.]  OUR  LORD'S  SELF-ASSERTION.  217 

We  may  freely  own  that  John's  Gospel  gives  greater 
prominence  to  this  class  of  our  Lord's  utterances,  but  we 
•deny  that  they  are  at  all  inconsistent  with  what  is  attributed 
to  Him  in  the  Synoptic  Gospels.  On  the  contrary,  the 
dignity  of  the  Saviour's  person,  and  the  duty  of  adhering  to 
Him,  are  as  strongly  stated  in  the  discourses  which  Matthew 
puts  into  his  mouth  as  in  any  later  Gospel :  'Whosoever  shall 
confess  me  before  men,  him  will  I  confess  also  before  my 
Father  which  is  in  heaven  ;  WThosoever  shall  deny  me  before 
men,  him  will  I  also  deny  before  my  Father  which  is  in 
heaven ;  '  He  that  receiveth  you  receiveth  me,  and  he  that 
receiveth  me  receiveth  Him  that  sent  me'  (x.  32,  33,  40). 
"*  Come  unto  me  all  ye  that  labour  and  are  heavy  laden,  and 
I  will  give  you  rest ;  Take  my  yoke  upon  you  and  learn  of 
me,  for  I  am  meek  and  lowly  in  heart,  and  ye  shall  find  rest 
for  your  souls;'  'All  things  are  delivered  unto  me  of  my 
Father,  and  no  man  knoweth  the  Son  but  the  Father,  neither 
knoweth  any  man  the  Father  save  the  Son,  and  he  to  whom 
soever  the  Son  will  reveal  him'  (xi.  27,  28,  29).  Again,  His 
present  glory  and  power  is  expressed  in  the  promises :  '  All 
power  is  given  unto  me  in  heaven  and  in  earth ; '  '  Lo,  I  am 
with  you  alway,  even  unto  the  end  of  the  world'  (xxviii.  18, 
20).  '  I  will  give  you  a  mouth  and  wisdom  which  all  your 
adversaries  shall  not  be  able  to  gainsay  nor  resist  (Luke  xxi. 
15).  But  it  is  a  small  matter  to  prove  that  our  Lord 
promised  that  after  His  departure  from  the  world  he  should 
continue  to  be  to  His  disciples  an  ever-present  and  powerful 
protector.  What  he  declared  concerning  His  second  com 
ing  more  decisively  marks  Him  out  as  one  who  claimed 
to  stand  on  a  different  level  from  ordinary  men.  St. 
Matthew  represents  Him  as  telling  that  all  the  tribes  of 
the  earth  shall  '  see  the  Son  of  Man  coming  in  the  clouds 
of  heaven  with  power  and  great  glory,  and  that  he  shall 
send  his  angels  with  a  great  sound  of  a  trumpet,  and  they 
shall  gather  together  his  elect  from  the  four  winds,  from 
one  end  of  heaven  to  the  other'  (xxiv.  30).  He  goes  on  to 
tell  (xxv.  31)  how  all  nations  shall  be  gathered  before  Him 
while  He  sits  on  the  throne  of  His  glory  and  pronounces 
judgment  upon  them ;  and  the  judgment  is  to  be  determined 


2l8  THE   JOHANNINE    BOOKS.  [xil. 

according  to  the  kindness  they  shall  have  shown  to  Himself. 
The  Synoptic  Evangelists  all  agree  in  representing  Jesus  as 
persisting  in  this  claim  to  the  end,  and  as  finally  incurring 
condemnation  for  blasphemy  from  the  high-priest  and  the 
Jewish  Council,  because,  in  answer  to  a  solemn  adjuration, 
He  professed  Himself  to  be  that  Son  of  Man  who  was  one 
day  to  come  in  the  clouds  of  heaven,  as  Daniel  had  pro 
phesied  (Matt,  xxvii.  65  ;  Mark  xiv.  62  ;  see  also  Luke  xxii. 
66).  Now,  reflect  for  a  moment  what  we  should  think  of  one 
who  declared  his  belief  that  on  that  great  day,  when  mankind 
shall  stand  before  the  judgment-seat  of  God,  he  should  not 
stand  like  others,  to  give  account  of  the  deeds  done  in  the 
body,  but  be  seated  on  the  throne  of  judgment,  passing  sen 
tence  on  the  rest  of  the  human  race.  If  we  could  think  of 
him  as,  after  all,  no  more  than  a  man  like  ourselves,  we  must 
set  him  down  as,  in  the  words  of  Strauss,  either  a  fool  or  an 
impostor.  We  can  only  avoid  forming  such  a  judgment  of 
Jesus  by  believing  Him  to  be  in  real  truth  more  than  man. 
It  follows  that  the  claims  which  the  Synoptic  Gospels  repre 
sent  our  Lord  as  making  for  Himself  are  so  high,  and,  if  He 
was  really  mere  man,  are  so  extravagant,  that  if  we  accept  the 
Synoptic  Gospels  as  truly  representing  the  character  of  our 
Lord's  language  about  Himself,  we  certainly  have  no  right 
to  reject  St.  John's  account,  on  the  score  that  it  puts  too 
exalted  language  about  Himself  into  the  mouth  of  our  Lord. 
If  it  is  objected  that  the  ascription  of  such  language  to 
Jesus  belongs  to  a  later  stage  of  Christian  thought,  and  that 
they  who  had  known  their  Master  after  the  flesh  could  not 
have  held  the  high  views  concerning  His  Person  which  this 
ascription  implies,  we  can  easily  show  that,  in  works  of 
earlier  date  than  anyone  has  claimed  for  the  fourth  Gospel, 
no  lower  view  is  expressed  of  the  dignity  of  our  Lord.  I 
have  already  said  (p.  25)  that  Baur  acknowledged  the  Apo 
calypse  to  have  been  written  by  St.  John ;  and  the  same  view 
is  taken  by  Renan  and  by  many  other  critics  of  the  same 
school,  who  draw  from  their  acknowledgment  of  the  Johan- 
nine  authorship  of  the  Apocalypse  their  strongest  argument 
against  that  of  the  fourth  Gospel ;  for  they  hold  it  to  be  one 
of  the  most  certain  conclusions  of  critical  science  that  the 


XII.]  CHRISTOLOGY   OF   THE   APOCALYPSE.  2ig 

two  books  could  not  have  had  the  same  author.  But  other 
critics  of  the  same  school  have  been  clear-sighted  enough  to 
perceive  that  the  acknowledgment  of  the  Johannine  author 
ship  of  the  Apocalypse  necessitates  the  abandonment  of  the 
argument  we  have  just  been  considering.  For  the  dignity 
ascribed  to  our  Lord  in  the  Book  of  Revelation  is  such  that 
it  requires  some  ingenuity  to  make  out  that  the  Gospel  attri 
butes  to  Him  any  higher.  All  through  the  Revelation  Jesus 
plainly  holds  a  position  far  above  that  of  any  created  being. 
He  is  described  as  'the  beginning  of  the  creation  of  God ' 
(iii.  14).  He  sits  on  the  throne  of  the  Father  of  all  (iii.  21). 
He  is  the  object  of  worship  of  every  created  thing  which  is 
in  the  heaven  and  on  the  earth,  and  under  the  earth,  and  in 
the  sea,  and  all  things  that  are  in  them  (v.  13).  His  blood 
has  been  an  atonement  which  sufficed  to  purchase  to  God 
men  of  every  tribe  and  tongue  and  people  and  nation  (v.  9). 
He  is  King  of  kings  and  Lord  of  lords  (xix.  16). 

When  I  was  speaking  of  the  lofty  claims  which  our  Lord, 
as  reported  by  the  Synoptic  Evangelists,  made  for  Himself,  I 
omitted  to  mention  one  illustration.  Those  who  wished  to 
do  Him  honour  are  related  to  have  saluted  Him  as  Son  of 
David  (Matt.  xx.  30 ;  xxi.  9) :  the  Jewish  rulers,  who  saw  all 
that  was  implied  by  such  a  title,  and  feared  the  fatal  conse 
quences  to  their  nation  which  would  follow  from  an  attempt 
to  restore  David's  earthly  kingdom,  hoped  that  the  Galilean 
prophet  would  disclaim  so  perilous  an  honour,  and  asked 
Him  to  rebuke  His  disciples  (xxi.  15).  He  not  only  accepted 
the  honours  offered  Him,  as  so  plainly  His  due,  that  if  His 
disciples  were  to  hold  their  peace  the  very  stones  would  cry 
out ;  but  He  went  on  to  intimate  that  the  title  Son  of  David 
was  less  than  He  could  rightfully  claim,  and  He  pointed  out 
that  the  Messiah  was  described  in  the  Book  of  Psalms  as 
David's  Lord  (xxii.  43).  I  am  disposed  to  connect  with  this 
the  words  ascribed  to  our  Lord  in  the  Apocalypse  (xxii.  16) : 
'I  am  the  root  and  the  offspring  of  David.'  It  is  possible  to 
give  the  word  pi£a  the  secondary  meaning,  'scion'  (having 
regard  to  Isa.  xi.  10;  Rom.  xv.  12;  Rev.  v.  5);  yet  I  prefer 
to  give  it  the  meaning  'root,'  which  implies  existence  prior 
to  David,  because  the  idea  of  priority  is  unmistakeably 


220  THE   JOHANNINE    BOOKS.  [XII. 

expressed  in  other  passages.  There  is  one  passage  in 
particular  where  the  antecedence  to  all  created  things  of 
Him  who  in  the  Revelation  is  called  the  Word  of  God  is 
expressed  in  such  a  way  as  not  to  fall  short  of  an  ascription 
to  Him  of  the  titles  and  prerogatives  of  the  Supreme  God. 
Whom  but  the  Supreme  God  should  we  imagine  to  be  speak 
ing  when  we  read  (i.  8):  'I  am  the  Alpha  and  the  Omega, 
saith  the  Lord  God,  which  is,  and  which  was,  and  which  is  to 
come,  the  Almighty'  ?  Read  on  a  little  way  (v.  17),  and  we 
find  One  who  is  unmistakeably  our  blessed  Lord  addressing 
the  Apocalyptic  seer  with  like  words,  which  are  again  re 
peated  (xxii.  13),  'I  am  the  Alpha  and  the  Omega,  the  first 
and  the  last,  the  beginning  and  the  end.'  The  fourth  Gospel 
puts  into  the  mouth  of  our  Lord  no  claim  of  Godhead  stronger 
or  more  express  than  what  the  glorified  Saviour  is  represented 
as  uttering  in  the  Book  of  the  Revelation.  And  this  ascription 
to  Him  of  glory  not  distinguished  from  that  of  the  Supreme 
is  a  prevailing  characteristic  of  the  book.  The  Son  of  God 
sits  down  with  His  Father  in  His  throne  (iii.  21);  and  this 
throne  is  called,  'the  throne  of  God  and  of  the  Lamb;  (xxii. 
i,  3  ;  cf.  xx.  6).  The  doctrine  of  the  Gospel  (v.  23)  that 
'all  should  honour  the  Son  even  as  they  honour  the  Father' 
is  deeply  stamped  on  the  Apocalypse. 

To  some  critics  it  has  seemed  incredible  that  one  who  had 
known  Jesus,  and  conversed  with  Him  as  a  man  like  himself, 
should  pay  Him  divine  honours  such  as  it  was  natural  enough 
for  enthusiastic  disciples  to  render,  in  whose  eyes  the  Founder 
of  their  religion  was  but  an  ideal  Personage.  On  that  account 
they  have  refused  to  believe  that  the  fourth  Evangelist  can 
be  one  who  had  been  a  personal  companion  of  our  Lord. 
But  here  we  find  that  the  Gospel  presents  no  more  exalted 
conception  of  the  Saviour's  dignity  than  that  which  is  offered 
in  the  Book  of  the  Revelation,  the  apostolic  authorship  of 
which  so  many  critics  of  all  schools  are  willing  to  acknow 
ledge.*  In  confirmation  of  the  view  that  the  Apocalypse  was 
written  by  a  personal  hearer  of  our  Lord,  I  may  notice  that 

*  See,  for  example,  the  passages  cited  from  Baur  and  Zeller  by  Arch 
deacon  Lee,  in  the  Speaker's  Commentary,  p.  406. 


xii.]   ST.  JOHN'S  LOCTRINE  COMPARED  WITH  ST.  PAUL'S.    221 

echoes  of  the  Gospel  records  of  the  words  of  Jesus  are  to  be 
found  more  frequently  in  this  than  in  any  other  New  Testa 
ment  book,  except  perhaps  the  Epistle  of  James.*  And  I 
cannot  help  thinking  that  we  should  find  still  more  coinci 
dences  if  we  had  a  fuller  record  of  the  words  of  Jesus  than 
that  preserved  in  the  Gospels.  Thus  St.  James  (i.  12)  refers 
to  our  Lord's  promise  of  a  'crown  of  life/  and  Zeller  hence 
drew  a  proof  (Hilgenfeld's  Zeitschrift,  1863,  p.  93)  that  the 
author  of  that  Epistle  used  the  Apocalypse,  Rev.  ii.  10  being 
the  only  New  Testament  place  where  such  a  promise  is  put 
into  the  mouth  of  our  Lord.  But  it  seems  to  me  much  more 
probable  that  we  have  here  reminiscences  by  two  independent 
hearers,  James  and  John,  of  words  actually  spoken  by  our 
Lord,  of  which  traces  are  also  to  be  found,  2  Tim-  iv.  8, 
i  Pet.  v.  4.  * 

Again,  when  the  prominence  given  to  the  doctrines  of 
our  Lord's  divinity  and  pre-existence  is  made  a  ground  for 
assigning  a  late  date  to  the  fourth  Gospel,  we  must  remember 
that  these  doctrines  are  taught  in  documents  earlier  than 
either  Gospel  or  Apocalypse — I  mean  St.  Paul's  Epistles.  I 
refer  in  particular  to  the  passage  in  the  Epistle  to  the  Colos- 
sians  (i.  15-18),  which  is  quite  as  strong  as  the  prologue  to 
St.  John.  Christ  is  there  the  'image  of  the  invisible  God,  the 
firstborn  of  every  creature;  for  by  him  were  all  things  created 
that  are  in  heaven  and  that  are  in  earth,  visible  and  invisible, 
whether  they  be  thrones  or  dominions,  or  principalities  or 
powers  ;  all  things  were  created  by  him  and  for  him ;  and  he 
is  before  all  things,  and  by  him  all  things  consist ;  and  he  is 
the  head  of  the  body,  the  Church ;  who  is  the  beginning,  the 
firstborn  from  the  dead,  that  in  all  things  he  might  have  the 
pre-eminence.'  Baur  very  consistently  refuses  to  believe  that 
this  was  written  by  St.  Paul :  but  most  critics,  even  of  the 
sceptical  school,  have  owned  that  the  evidence  for  the  genu 
ineness  of  the  Epistle  to  the  Colossians  is  too  strong  to  be 
resisted,  especially  connected  as  it  is  with  the  Epistle  to 
Philemon,  which  bears  an  unmistakeable  stamp  of  truth,  and 
which  is  utterly  beyond  the  invention  of  any  forger. 

*  For  example: — i.  7,  Matt.  xxiv.  30;  ii.  7,  Matt.  xi.  15,  &c.  :  ii.  23, 
Matt.  xvi.  27;  ii.  26,  Matt.  xxiv.  13;  iii.  3,  Matt.  xxiv. 42;  iii.  5,  Matt.  x.  32 


222  THE   JOHANNINE    BOOKS.  [xil. 

In  this  connexion  I  have  pleasure  in  referring  to  an  excel 
lent  comparison  of  the  theology  of  St.  John  with  that  of  St. 
Paul  by  Mr.  J.  J.  Murphy  {Scientific  Bases  of  Faith,  p.  365), 
where  he  founds  an  argument  for  the  truth  of  their  doctrine 
on  the  coincidence  of  two  independent  witnesses.  Both  are 
found  to  express  the  same  doctrines,  but  in  quite  different 
language ;  whereas  if  the  fourth  Gospel  had  been  indebted 
to  St.  Paul  we  should  have  found  there  some  of  St.  Paul's 
expressions  as  well  as  his  doctrine.* 

I  have  devoted  so  much  time  to  the  objection  brought 
against  the  fourth  Gospel  from  the  character  of  its  Chris- 
tology,  because,  though  not  really  the  strongest,  it  is,  I 
believe,  the  most  influential ;  and  the  reason  why  other  argu 
ments  have  been  sought  for  is  the  fear  that  the  reception  of 
the  fourth  Gospel  would  give  apostolic  authority  to  a  view 
of  our  Lord's  person  which  the  objectors  are  determined  to 
reject.  I  consider  that  I  have  shown  that  this  view  was  at 
least  that  accepted  among  Christians  several  years  before  the 
date  claimed  either  for  Gospel  or  Apocalypse ;  and  that  I 
have  shown  also  that  though  the  fourth  Gospel  may  give 
greater  prominence  than  do  the  preceding  three  to  those 
utterances  of  our  Lord  in  which  He  asserts  His  own  super 
human  character,  there  is  nothing  in  such  utterances  unlike 


*  Compare  the  teaching  of  each  of  the  Apostles  on  the  Deity  of  Christ 
(John  i.  i,  iii.  13,  xx.  28 ;  Rom.  ix.  5,  Phil.  ii.  6)  ;  his  pre-existence  (John 
vi.  62,  viii.  58,  xvii.  5  ;  Col.  i.  17);  his  work  of  creation  (John  i.  3  ;  i 
Cor.  viii.  6,  Col.  i.  16)  ;  the  association  of  his  name  with  that  of  God  on 
terms  of  equality  (John  v.  18,  23,  xiv,  10,  23,  xvii.  3,  10 ;  2  Cor.  xiii.  14; 
Gal.  i.  I  ;  Eph.  v.  5,  i  Thess.  iii.  n) ;  the  voluntariness  of  his  humiliation 
(John  x.  17  ;  2  Cor.  viii.  9,  Phil.  ii.  7) ;  his  present  power  and  glory  (John 
iii.  35,  xiv.  14 ;  Rom.  xiv.  9,  i  Cor.  xv.  25,  Eph.  i.  20,  Phil.  ii.  10)  ;  that 
by  him  only  access  is  had  to  the  Father  (John  xiv.  6  ;  Eph.  ii.  18,  I  Tim. 
ii.  5) ;  that  by  faith  in  him  we  are  justified  (John  iii.  15,  vi.  47,  xi.  25,  xx. 
31  ;  Rom.  iii.  22,  v.  i,  Gal.  ii.  16,  Eph.  ii.  8)  ;  that  atonement  has  been 
made  by  him  (John  i.  29,  vi.  51,  I  John  i.  7,  ii.  2,  iii.  5  ;  Rom.  iii.  24,  v. 
9,  i  Cor.  v.  7,  Gal.  iii.  13,  Eph.  i.  7) ;  that  his  life  is  the  source  of  his 
people's  life  (John  vi.  53 ;  Rom.  v.  10) ;  that  they  are  united  with  him 
(John  xv.  5  :  i  John  ii.  5,  iii.  6,  iv.  13  ;  Rom.  viii.  17,  2  Cor.  xiii.  5,  Gal. 
ii.  20,  iii.  27) ;  that  our  relation  to  him  is  like  his  relation  to  the  Father 
(John  x.  14,  15,  xiv.  20,  xv.  9  :  i  Cor.  iii.  22) :  on  all  these  points  you 
will  find  a  wonderful  similarity  of  substantial  doctrine  with  great  variety 
of  expression.  The  two  witnesses  are  clearly  independent,  and  their 
teaching  is  the  same  :  see  also  Lias's  Doctrinal  System  of  St.  John. 


XII.]          CHRISTOLOGY   OF    GOSPEL   AND   APOCALYPSE.  223 

what  is  found  in  every  report   of  the  language  which  He 
habitually  used.* 

*  At  the  very  time  when  the  first  edition  of  these  lectures  was  pub 
lished,  the  Hibbert  Lectures  were  delivered  in  London,  by  Dr.  Pfleiderer, 
Professor  of  Theology  at  Berlin,  a  pupil  of  Baur's,  but  who  has  retired 
from  some  of  his  master's  extreme  positions.  Pfleiderer  still  maintains 
the  anti-Paulinism  of  the  Apocalypse,  but  he  is  in  perfect  agreement  with 
what  I  had  said  as  to  the  identity  of  the  Christology  of  the  book  with  that 
of  Paul ;  and  as  to  the  impossibility  of  denying  the  Johannine  origin  of  the 
Gospel,  on  account  of  its  Christology,  without  on  the  same  ground 
denying  that  of  the  Apocalypse.  I  cannot  forbear  quoting  at  length: — 

'  Like  the  Pauline  Christology,  that  of  the  author  of  the  Apocalypse 
hinges  on  the  one  hand  on  the  expiatory  death,  and  on  the  other  on  the 
celestial  glory  of  Christ,  whilst  the  earthly  life  of  Jesus  is  referred  to  only 
so  far  that  Christ  is  called  the  "  Offspring  of  David"  and  the  "  Lion  of 
Juda;"  just  as  Paul  in  the  Epistle  to  the  Romans  had  connected  Christ's 
descent  from  David  with  his  Divine  Sonship.  As  Paul  denominated 
Christ  the  Passover  slain  for  us,  so  our  author  likes  to  describe  him  as 
"  the  Lamb  slain  for  us,"  and  finds  in  his  violent  death  a  proof  of  his  love 
for  us  and  an  expiation  to  purify  us  from  the  guilt  of  sin,  a  ransom  to 
redeem  us  to  God.  Again,  as  Paul  calls  Christ  the  first  fruits  of  them 
that  slept,  so  in  the  Apocalypse  we  find  him  termed  the  first-born  from  the 
dead.  As,  according  to  Paul,  Christ  has  been  exalted  to  the  regal  dignity 
of  divine  dominion  over  all,  so,  according  to  our  author,  he  has  taken  his 
seat  on  the  throne  by  the  side  of  his  Father,  participating  therefore  in  his 
divine  dominion  and  power ;  he  is  the  Lord  of  the  churches,  holds  their 
stars,  or  guardian  angels,  in  his  hand,  and  is  also  Ruler  of  nations  and 
King  of  kings,  the  all-wise  and  almighty  Judge  of  the  nations  ;  indeed,  to 
him  is  due  a  worship  similar  to  that  of  God  himself.  As  the  author  of  the 
Apocalypse  in  his  apotheosis  of  Christ  as  an  object  of  worship  thus  almost 
outstrips  Paul,  neither  does  he  in  his  dogmatic  definitions  of  Christ's 
nature  at  all  fall  behind  the  Apostle.  Like  Paul,  he  calls  Christ  the  "  Son 
of  God"  in  the  metaphysical  sense  of  a  god-like  spiritual  being,  and  far 
beyond  the  merely  theocratic  significance  of  the  title.  As  Paul  had  said, 
'  The  Lord  is  the  Spirit,'  so  our  author  identifies  Christ  with  the  Spirit,  or 
celestial  principle  of  revelation  which  speaks  to  the  Churches  and  rules  in 
them.  As  Paul  had  had  a  vision  of  Christ  as  the  Man  from  heaven  in 
celestial  light  and  glory,  so  the  author  of  the  Apocalypse  likewise  beholds 
Him  in  a  super-mundane  form  like  unto  a  son  of  man,  his  face  shining  as 
the  sun.  As  Paul  had  described  the  celestial  Son  of  Man  as  at  the  same 
time  the  image  of  God,  the  agent  of  creation,  the  head  of  every  man,  and 
finally  even  God  over  all,  so  the  Christ  of  the  Apocalypse  introduces 
Himself  with  the  predicates  of  Divine  majesty,  "I  am  the  Alpha  and  the 
Omega',  saith  the  Lord  God,  who  is,  and  who  was,  and  who  is  to  come,  the 
All-powerful ;"  and  He  is  accordingly  called  also  "  the  Head  of  creation,'* 
and  "  the  Word  of  God,"  that  is,  the  mediating  instrument  of  all  Divine 
revelation  from  the  creation  of  the  world  to  the  final  judgment. 

'  It  appears  from  this  that  the  similarity  of  the  Christology  of  the  Apo 
calypse  to  that  of  Paul  is  complete  ;  this  Christ  occupies  the  same  exalted 
position  as  the  Pauline  Christ  above  the  terrestrial  Son  of  Man.  Would 
such  a  view  of  Christ  be  conceivable  in  the  case  of  a  man  who  had  lived  in 
personal  intercourse  with  Jesus  ?  I  think  we  have  in  this  another  proof 
that  the  author  of  the  Apocalypse  was  not  the  Apostle  John.' — Pfleiderer, 
Hibbert  Lectures,  pp.  158-161. 


224  THE   JOHANNINE    BOOKS. 

XIII. 

PART    II. 

THE    FOURTH    GOSPEL   AND    THE   APOCALYPSE. 

I  COME  now  to  discuss  the  objection  that  is  most  relied  on,, 
and  to  which  I  have  already  referred,  that  the  Apocalypse 
and  the  fourth  Gospel  are  so  different  in  style  and  character 
that  it  is  impossible  to  believe  they  can  have  been  written 
by  the  same  person  ;  and  that  since  John  the  Apostle  wrote 
the  Apocalypse  he  could  not  have  written  the  Gospel.  This 
argument  is  borrowed  from  Dionysius  of  Alexandria,  who 
lived  in  the  third  century,  and  who  made  the  converse  use  of 
it,  namely,  that  as  John  wrote  the  Gospel  he  could  not  have 
written  the  Apocalypse.  And  certainly,  if  we  had  to  assign 
to  the  Apostle  but  one  of  the  two,  and  were  only  guided  by 
external  evidence,  we  should  have  more  reason  to  assign  him 
the  Gospel.  The  only  point  of  advantage  for  the  Apocalypse 
is  that  Justin  Martyr  happens  to  name  the  Apostle  John  as 
its  author,  while  he  uses  the  Gospel  without  mention  of  the 
Evangelist's  name.  On  the  other  hand,  the  proof  of  early 
acknowledgment,  by  heretics  as  well  as  by  orthodox,  is  rather 
stronger  for  the  Gospel  (see  p.  58)  ;  and  the  reception  of  the 
Gospel  in  the  Church  was  unanimous,  which  is  more  than  we 
can  say  for  the  Apocalypse. 

However,  in  either  case,  the  external  evidence  is  amply 
sufficient.  For  the  Apocalypse,  in  addition  to  Justin,  I  could 
quote  Papias  and  quite  a  long  list  of  second-century  witnesses 
to  its  recognition  in  the  Church  (see  Westcott,  N.  T.  Canon, 
Index,  p.  587).  I  content  myself  with  appealing  to  Irenaeus, 
whose  testimony  to  the  four  Gospels  has  been  already  pro 
duced  (p.  37).  He  is  equally  strong  in  his  witness  to  the 
Apocalypse.  A  remarkable  passage  is  one  (v.  30)  in  which 
he  discusses  whether  the  true  reading  of  the  number  of  the 
Beast  is  666  or  616,  both  readings  being  found  in  MSS.  of  his 
time,  as  they  are  still.*  Irengeus  declares  that  the  reading 

*  616  is  the  reading  of  Codd.  C,  n. 


XIII.]  THE   APOCALYPSE.  225 

666  is  that  of  the  best  and  oldest  copies,  and  is  attested  by 
those  who  had  seen  John  face  to  face.  We  cannot  but  be 
struck  by  this  mention  of  a  traditional  knowledge  of  the 
prophecy  concurrent  with  the  evidence  of  the  written  copies. 
The  estimation  in  which  Irenseus  held  the  book  is  evidenced 
by  the  sense  he  expresses  of  the  guilt  and  penalty  incurred 
by  those  who  substituted  the  erroneous  number  for  the  true, 
though  he  trusts  that  those  may  obtain  pardon  whose  adop 
tion  of  the  error  was  not  wilful.  The  denunciation  (Rev. 
xxii.  1 8,  19)  had  previously  been  clearly  referred  to  by 
Dionysius  of  Corinth  (Euseb.  iv.  23).  Irenaeus  gives  ex 
amples  of  Greek  names  the  arithmetical  value  of  the  sum 
of  whose  letters  amounts  to  666  (evavOds,  Xarecvos,  retrav),  but 
he  does  not  venture  to  express  a  confident  decision  in  favour 
of  any  solution  ;  because  he  looks  on  the  Apostle  as  having 
designedly  left  the  matter  obscure,  since  if  he  had  wished  the 
name  to  be  known  at  the  time  he  would  have  spoken  plainly. 
And  whatever  reasons  there  were  for  hiding  the  name  at  the 
first  must  still  exist  in  the  time  of  Irenaeus.  '  For  it  was  not 
long  ago  that  the  vision  was  seen,  but  almost  in  our  own 
generation,  at  the  end  of  the  reign  of  Domitian.'  I  shall 
presently  return  to  speak  of  the  statement  here  made  as  to 
the  date  of  the  book.  The  Muratorian  Fragment  twice  refers 
to  the  Apocalypse.  In  speaking  of  Paul's  Epistles  the  writer 
says  that  Paul  had  written  letters  to  seven  Churches,  following 
the  order  of  his  predecessor  John,  who  in  the  Apocalypse  had 
written  to  seven  Churches.  Further  on  he  says  :  '  We  receive 
only  the  Revelations  of  John  and  of  Peter,  the  latter  of 
which  some  of  us  will  not  have  read  in  the  Church.'  Of 
this  Apocalypse  of  Peter  I  must  take  another  opportunity 
to  speak. 

We  may  assume,  then,  that  in  the  time  of  Irenaeus  the 
Apocalypse  was  commonly  received,  and  that  on  it  were 
founded  the  expectations  that  generally  prevailed  of  a  per 
sonal  reign  of  our  Lord  on  earth  for  a  thousand  years.  But 
these  expectations  soon  assumed  a  very  gross  and  carnal 
character.  I  will  quote  the  tradition  which  Irenaeus  (v.  33) 
cites  from  Papias,  a  tradition  which  consoles  us  for  the  loss 
we  have  sustained  of  the  work  in  which  Papias  collected 

Q 


226  THE   JOHANNINE    BOOKS.  [XIII. 

unwritten  records  of  the  Saviour's  teaching,  and  which 
probably  was  one  of  the  causes  which  moved  Eusebius  (iii.  39) 
to  pronounce  Papias  a  man  of  weak  understanding.  *  The 
elders  who  saw  John,  the  disciple  of  our  Lord,  remembered  to 
have  heard  from  him  that  our  Lord  taught  and  said :  The 
days  shall  come  in  which  vines  shall  grow,  each  having  10,000 
shoots,  and  on  each  shoot  10,000  branches,  and  on  each 
branch  10,000  twigs,  and  on  each  twig  10,000  clusters,  and 
on  each  cluster  10,000  grapes;  and  each  grape  when  pressed 
shall  yield  25  measures  of  wine  ;  and  when  any  of  the  saints 
shall  have  taken  hold  of  one  of  these  clusters  another  shall 
say :  I  am  a  better  cluster  ;  take  me  and  bless  the  Lord 
through  me.  Likewise,  also,  a  grain  of  wheat  shall  produce 
10,000  ears,  and  every  ear  10,000  grains,  and  every  grain  ten 
pounds  of  pure  white  meal,  and  the  other  fruits,  seeds,  and 
vegetables  in  like  manner.  And  all  the  animals  using  the 
food  thus  yielded  by  the  earth  shall  be  peaceful  and  agree 
together,  and  be  subject  to  man  with  all  subjection.  .  .  .  And 
He  added:  These  things  are  credible  to  believers.  And  when 
Judas  the  traitor  did  not  believe,  and  asked  Him,  How  shall 
such  growth  be  accomplished  ?  the  Lord  said :  They  shall 
see  who  come  to  those  times.'* 

This  is  a  specimen  of  the  kind  of  notions  which  were 
current  under  the  name  of  Chiliasm ;  and  spiritual  men  were 
shocked  at  seeing  their  Christian  brethren  looking  forward 
to  a  kind  of  Mahometan  paradise,  the  chief  enjoyment  of  which 
was  to  consist  of  the  pleasures  of  sense,  not  excluding  those 
of  the  grossest  kind.  Hence  arose  a  strong  reaction  against 
Millennarian  ideas,  and  hence  also  a  disposition  to  reject  the 
inspiration  of  the  book  on  which  the  Millennarians  mainly 

*  Great  light  has  been  cast  on  the  probable  source  of  this  tradition  of 
Papias  through  the  publication  from  theSyriac,  by  Ceriani  (Milan,  1866), 
of  a  Jewish  book  called  the  Apocalypse  of  Baruch.  It  is  included  in 
Fritzsche's  'Apocryphal  books  of  the  Old  Testament'  (Leipzig,  1871). 
Fritzsche  judges  the  book  to  have  been  written  not  long  after  the  destruc 
tion  of  Jerusalem  by  Titus.  The  book  contains  (c.  29)  a  description  of  the 
times  of  the  Messiah,  in  which  it  is  predicted  that  a  vine  shall  have  1000 
shoots,  each  shoot  1000  clusters,  each  cluster  1000  grapes,  and  each  grape 
shall  yield  a  measure  of  wine.  It  is  reasonable  to  think  that  this  book 
furnished  the  original  of  the  story,  which,  before  it  reached  Papias,  had 
been  considerably  improved,  and  had  come  to  be  referred  to  a  saying  of 
our  Lord. 


XIII.]  DIONYSIUS   OF   ALEXANDRIA.  227 

relied.  In  the  beginning  of  the  third  century  Caius,  of  whom 
I  spoke  in  a  former  lecture,  ascribed  the  book  to  the  heretic 
Cerinthus.  The  proof  of  this  had  not  been  complete,  but 
the  matter  has  lately  been  put  beyond  doubt. 

Dionysius  of  Alexandria,  whose  criticism  on  the  Book  of 
Revelation  I  am  about  to  quote  presently,  begins  it  by  saying 
that  some  of  his  predecessors  had  utterly  rejected  this  book, 
criticizing  every  chapter,  pronouncing  it  to  be  unintelligible 
and  inconsistent,  and  declaring  that  the  title,  '  Revelation  of 
John'  was  doubly  false.  For  they  said  that  a  book  so  obscure 
did  not  deserve  to  be  called  a  revelation,  and  that  the  author, 
far  from  being  an  Apostle,  was  not  even  a  member  of  the 
Church,  but  was  Cerinthus,  the  founder  of  the  Cerinthian 
heresy  :  whose  doctrine  was  that  the  kingdom  of  Christ  should 
be  earthly.  For  being  a  carnal  and  sensual  man,  he  dreamed 
that  its  enjoyments  would  consist  in  those  grosser  bodily  plea 
sures  which  he  himself  coveted,  and,  for  a  decorous  cover 
to  these,  feastings  and  sacrifices,  and  slaughters  of  victims 
(Euseb.  H,  E.  vii.  25).  Scholars  had  combined  this  state 
ment  of  Dionysius  with  an  extract  given  by  Eusebius  (H.  E. 
iii.  28),  from  the  dialogue  of  Caius  against  the  Montanists. 
In  this  passage,  Caius  rejects  a  book  of  revelations  purport 
ing  to  have  been  written  by  a  great  apostle,  and  containing 
an  account  of  miraculous  communications  made  to  him  by 
angels.  Caius  ascribes  the  real  authorship  of  the  book  to 
Cerinthus,  and  states  that  these  spurious  revelations  taught 
that  after  the  Resurrection  the  kingdom  of  Christ  should  be 
earthly ;  that  the  flesh  of  the  risen  saints  should  again  be 
enslaved  to  lusts  and  pleasures  ;  that  they  should  inhabit 
Jerusalem,  and  should  spend  a  thousand  years  in  marriage 
festivities. 

Some  critics  inferred  from  coincidences  of  expression 
that  Caius  was  the  writer  referred  to  by  Dionysius  ;  but  it  was 
urged,  on  the  other  hand,  that  Eusebius  gives  no  hint  that 
Caius  was  speaking  of  the  book  which  we  know  as  the 
Revelation  of  St.  John ;  that  that  book  does  not  expressly 
claim  to  be  written  by  an  Apostle ;  that  it  nowhere  describes 
millennial  happiness  as  consisting  in  sensual  gratifications ; 
and  that  Caius  shows  no  consciousness  that  he  was  express- 

Q  2 


228  THE   JOHANNINE    BOOKS.  |_XIII. 

ing  an  opinion  different  from  that  of  the  Roman  Church  of 
his  time,  which,  as  we  know  from  the  Muratorian  Fragment, 
and  from  Hippolytus,  accepted  the  Book  of  the  Apocalypse 
as  Johannine.  But  the  question  has  recently  been  set  at 
rest  through  the  bringing  to  light*  of  a  work  in  which  the 
Syriac  writer  Bar  Salibi,  whom  I  have  already  had  occasion 
to  mention  (p.  84),  quotes  some  of  the  criticisms  of  Caius  on 
the  Apocalypse,  together  with  replies  to  them  by  Hippolytus. 
And  from  the  specimens  given  by  Bar  Salibi  it  seems  to  me 
that  the  character  of  the  work  of  Caius,  from  which  he  quotes, 
must  have  exactly  answered  to  the  description  of  Dionysius, 
viz.  that  it  must  have  gone  systematically  through  the  book 
of  the  Revelation,  criticizing  it  in  detail,  so  that  there  is 
reason  to  conclude  that  Caius  was  the  author  to  whom 
Dionysius  referred. 

We  hear  of  opposition  to  the  book  by  no  one  else  in  the 
West ;  but  in  the  East  its  authority  decayed.  It  is  not  in 
cluded  in  the  Peshitto  Syriac,f  and  Jerome  tells  us  that  the 
Greeks  of  his  time  did  not  receive  it  (Ep.  129,  ad  Dard.)* 
Eusebius  speaks  doubtfully  about  it,  and  seems  divided 
between  his  own  judgment,  formed  from  the  contents  of  the 
book,  which  inclined  him  to  reject  it,  and  the  weight  of 
external  evidence  in  its  favour,  which  he  found  it  hard  to  set 
aside.  He  consequently  shrinks  from  expressing  his  own 
opinion,  and  tries  to  cast  on  his  readers  the  responsibility  of 
forming  a  judgment  (H.  E.  iii.  25,  39).  Towards  the  end  of 
the  fourth  century  there  were  a  few,  of  whom  we  are  told  by 
Epiphanius  and  Philaster  (Haer.  60),  who  ascribed  both  Gospel 
and  Apocalypse  to  Cerinthus.  Epiphanius  calls  them  Alogi ; 
but  it  is  a  mistake  to  suppose  that  there  was  a  sect  of  heretics 
of  the  name.  This  was  only  a  clever  nickname  invented  by 
Epiphanius  (Haer.  51,  3)  for  the  opponents  of  the  Logos 


*  This  was  done  by  Dr.  Gwynn,  Hermathena,  1888.  The  work  of 
Bar  Salibi  is  in  MS.  in  the  British  Museum,  and  it  would  seem  that  no 
Syriac  scholar  had  previously  read  enough  of  it  to  find  these  interesting 
quotations  from  Caius. 

t  Yet  we  find  Theophilus  of  Antioch  using  the  book  before  the  end  of 
the  second  century  (Euseb.  iv.  24).  Ephraem  Syrus  cites  Rev.  v.  1-3, 
(Serm.  Exeg.  in  Ps.  cxl.  3.  Opp.  Syr.  ii.  332). 


XIII.]  DIONYSIUS   OF   ALEXANDRIA.  22Q 

Gospel,  the  word  being  intended  to  denote  the  irrational 
character  of  their  opposition.  I  do  not  know  that  there  were 
ever  enough  of  them  to  make  a  sect  ;*  and  they  seem  un 
worthy  of  notice,  since  their  objections  as  reported  by  Epipha- 
nius  do  not  profess  to  have  rested  on  any  grounds  of  external 
testimony.  Their  ascribing  the  Gospel  to  Cerinthus  shows 
that  they  believed  in  its  antiquity,  since  Cerinthus  was  con 
temporary  with  St.  John.  This  report  of  the  evidence  justifies 
me  in  saying  that  if  we  were  compelled  to  abandon  one  or 
other,  we  should  have  far  more  countenance  from  antiquity 
for  ascribing  the  Gospel  to  St.  John  than  for  attributing  to 
him  the  Book  of  Revelation.  At  the  same  time  I  regard  the 
evidence  for  the  latter  as  amply  sufficient,  because  the  testi 
mony  in  its  favour  is  a  century  or  two  earlier  than  the  doubts 
which  arose  concerning  it,  and  which  seem  to  have  arisen 
entirely  from  unwillingness  to  accept  the  doctrine  of  a  future 
reign  of  our  Lord  on  this  earth. 

I  wish  now  to  state  a  little  more  fully  the  argument  of 
Dionysius  of  Alexandria,  because  it  is  an  interesting  specimen 


*  In  fact  I  now  believe  that  '  the  Alogi '  consisted  of  Caius,  and,  as  far 
as  I  can  learn,  nobody  else.  I  have  already  said  (p.  168)  with  what  caution 
we  are  obliged  to  receive  the  statements  of  Epiphanius.  Lipsius  in  the 
work  quoted  (note,  p.  148)  has  endeavoured  to  ascertain  from  what  authorities 
the  statements  in  his  treatise  against  heresies  were  derived,  with  the  result 
of  rinding  that  what  may  be  called  the  basis  of  the  work  was  a  treatise 
against  heresies  composed  at  the  beginning  of  the  third  century  by 
Hippolytus,  which  Epiphanius,  rather  more  than  150  years  afterwards, 
enlarged  by  adding  to  the  thirty-two  heresies  with  which  it  dealt  notices 
of  some  which  had  appeared  in  the  meantime,  and  others  which  he  con 
ceived  that  his  own  research  had  discovered.  The  work  of  Hippolytus  is 
lost ;  but  we  know  it  through  independent  use  made  of  it  by  Philaster,  a 
contemporary  of  Epiphanius,  and  through  a  list  of  heresies  erroneously 
included  among  the  works  of  Tertullian,  which  was  derived  from  the  same 
source.  We  know  now  for  certain  that  in  what  Epiphanius  says,  in  refuta 
tion  of  the  opponents  of  the  Apocalypse,  he  was  drawing  from  Hippolytus  ; 
for  one  objection  and  reply  are  the  same  as  those  which  Dr.  Gwynn  has 
recovered  as  part  of  the  controversy  between  Caius  and  Hippolytus. 
There  is  a  question,  however,  whether  Epiphanius  took  his  section  from 
the  treatise  against  the  thirty-two  heresies,  or  from  some  other  work  of 
Hippolytus,  among  whose  lost  writings  was  one  bearing  the  title,  'In 
defence  of  the  Gospel  and  Apocalypse  of  St.  John,'  which,  in  all  proba 
bility,  was  the  book  written  in  controversy  with  Caius.  But  in  any  case 
we  have  reason  to  think  that  Hippolytus  treated  his  opponent's  opinion  as 
heresy ;  for  the  Syriac  fragments  speak  of  him  as  the  '  heretic  Caius.' 

There  is  no  reason  to  think  that  Epiphanius  knew  anything  more  about 


230  THE   JOHANNINE    BOOKS.  [xill. 

of  an  early  application  of  critical  science  to  discriminate 
the  claims  of  different  books  ascribed  to  the  same  author. 
Dionysius  was  bishop  of  Alexandria  from  247  to  265,  and  had 
been  the  successor  of  Origen  as  president  of  the  Cateche 
tical  School  of  Alexandria.  Origen  had  acknowledged  the 
Apocalypse  as  the  work  of  the  Apostle  John,  and,  by  his 
favourite  method  of  allegorical  interpretation,  had  got  over 
the  difficulties  which  the  literal  acceptance  of  its  doctrines 
might  have  occasioned.  But  the  mass  of  simple  believers 
could  not  be  satisfied  with  these  philosophical  refinements, 
and  protested  against  them.  The  argument  which  I  am 
about  to  quote  was  offered  first  on  what  seems  to  me  a  very 
remarkable  occasion.  Dionysius  of  Alexandria  is  a  man 
whom  we  know  mainly  by  some  extracts  from  his  writings 
preserved  by  Eusebius  ;  and  there  is  none  of  the  early  Fathers 
who  impresses  me  more  favourably  as  a  man  of  earnest  piety, 
good  sense,  moderation,  and  Christian  charity.  On  the  occa 
sion  to  which  I  refer  he  worked  what  I  account  one  of  the 
greatest  and  most  authentic  miracles  of  ecclesiastical  his 
tory.  His  diocese  being  much  troubled  with  disputes  on  the 

the  so-called  Alogi  than  what  he  learned  from  Hippolytus.  There  are  two 
discrepancies  between  his  account  and  that  of  Philaster.  Epiphanius 
speaks  of  these  heretics  as  ascribing  both  Gospel  and  Apocalypse  to 
Cerinthus  ;  but  we  may  take  this  as  an  ordinary  instance  of  his  carelessness 
in  using  his  authorities,  for  there  is  no  doubt  that  Philaster  is  right  in 
naming  only  the  Apocalypse  as  so  ascribed.  The  other  difference  relates  to 
the  name  Alogi,  for  which  name  Epiphanins,  as  I  have  said,  takes  credit 
as  his  own  invention.  Early  writers  on  heresy  had  taken  the  opportunity 
of  stigmatizing  opponents  by  enumerating  as  heretics,  in  addition  to  the 
well-known  sects  of  heretics,  Valentinians,  Marcionites,  &c.,  the  holders  of 
various  opinions  from  which  they  dissented.  Thus  Philaster  has  in  his  list 
of  heretics  those  who  denied  all  the  150  Psalms  to  have  been  written  by 
David  (Haer.  130) ;  those  who  denied  the  Pauline  authorship  of  the 
Epistle  to  the  Hebrews  (Haer.  89) ;  those  who  asserted  the  plurality  of 
worlds  (Haer.  115);  those  who  held  the  age  of  the  world  to  be  uncertain 
(Haer.  112),  &c.  &c.  But  there  are  no  anonymous  heretics  in  Epi 
phanius.  Where  he  finds  in  his  authorities  those  who  held  this  or  that 
erroneous  opinion  described  as  heretics,  he  must  invent  a  name  for  them — 
a  habit  which  gives  the  modern  reader  the  impression  that  the  Alogi,  for 
example,  were  a  set  of  people  combined  into  a  sect,  for  which  idea 
there  is  no  foundation.  Thus  when  we  trace  back  Epiphanius  to  his 
authorities,  we  find  that  his  reason  for  asserting  the  existence  of  a  sect  of 
Alogi  was  that  Hippolytus  had  enumerated  among  heretics  '  those  who 
reject  the  Gospel  and  Apocalypse  of  St.  John.'  If  we  inquire  whom 
Hippolytus  had  in  view,  we  can  answer  confidently,  his  antagonist  Caius. 


XIII.]  DIONYSIUS   OF   ALEXANDRIA.  231 

Millennarian  controversy,  he  assembled  those  whom  perhaps 
another  bishop  would  have  denounced  as  heretics  ;  and  he 
held  a  three  days'  public  discussion  with  them  :  the  result 
being  what  I  have  never  heard  of  as  the  result  of  any  other 
public  discussion — that  he  talked  his  opponents  round,  and 
brought  all  to  complete  agreement  with  himself  (H.  E.  vii. 
24).  I  am,  however,  less  surprised  at  this  result  from  the 
specimen  which  Eusebius  gives  us  of  the  manner  in  which 
Dionysius  dealt  with  the  authority  of  the  leading  Millen 
narian  of  his  district,  Nepos,  who  was  then  not  long  dead, 
and  whose  name  had  at  that  time  the  authority  which  that  of 
Keble  has  now,  the  favour  in  which  his  sacred  poetry  was 
held  gaining  favour  for  a  certain  school  of  theological 
opinions.  Nothing  can  be  more  conciliatory  than  the  grace 
ful  way  in  which  Dionysius  speaks  of  Nepos  and  of  the  ser 
vices  which  he  had  rendered  the  Church  ;  in  particular  by  his 
composition  of  hymns,  for  which  Dionysius  expresses  a  high 
value,  though  he  claims  the  liberty  which  he  is  sure  Nepos 
himself,  if  living,  would  have  allowed  him,  of  testing  his 
opinions  by  Scripture.  The  most  formidable  difficulty 

If  we  ask  had  he  anyone  else  in  view,  we  must  say  that  we  have  no 
evidence. 

But  did  Cams  reject  the  Gospel  ?  This  is  asserted  by  no  other  writer, 
and  in  the  Syriac  fragments  Caius  is  refuted  out  of  the  Gospel,  as  if  it  were 
an  authority  which  he  recognized.  It  is  no  doubt  possible  that  Caius,  in 
his  opposition  to  the  Montanists,  may  have  spoken  disparagingly  of  the 
Gospel,  on  which  they  founded  their  hopes  of  the  teaching  of  the  Paraclete  ; 
but  it  is  also  possible  that  Hippolytus,  being  convinced  of  the  common 
authorship  of  Gospel  and  Apocalypse,  thought  himself  entitled  to  use 
the  controversial  advantage  of  bracketing  the  opponents  of  one  with  the 
opponents  of  the  other.  Irenaeus  informs  us  of  the  existence  of  heretics 
who  rejected  St.  John's  Gospel,  though  his  language  is  too  vague  to  let  us 
know  to  what  school  they  belonged. 

Iconsider  that  the  work  of  Hippolytus,  of  which  Epiphanius  made  use,  must 
have  said  very  little  about  the  opponents  of  the  Gospel.  Where  Epiphanius 
deals  with  the  opponents  of  the  Apocalypse,  the  objections  and  replies 
have  every  mark  of  antiquity,  and  were  no  doubt  derived  from  Hippolytus. 
But  the  section  on  the  Gospel  is  distinctly  Epiphanius's  own.  He  cites 
authors  later  than  Hippolytus:  Ephraem  (c.  22);  Porphyry  (c.  8).  The 
system  of  chronology  is  not  that  of  Hippolytus,  nor  does  he  agree  with 
Hippolytus  as  to  the  duration  of  our  Lord's  ministry  on  earth.  The  whole 
section  gives  me  the  impression  that  Epiphanius,  being  obliged  by  his  title 
to  answer  objections  to  the  Gospel,  and  rinding  none  specified  in  his  autho 
rities,  was  reduced  to  manufacture  objections,  as  well  as  answers,  by  his 
own  ingenuity.  _,__j 


232  THE   JOHANNINE    BOOKS.  [xill. 

Dionysius  has  to  encounter  in  dealing  with  the  Millennarians 
is  the  Apocalypse,  and  this  he  meets  by  a  theory  of  his  own. 
The  criticism  of  Dionysius,  and  his  denial  that  the  John  of  the 
Apocalypse  was  the  Apostle  John,  rests,  you  will  observe,  on 
no  external  evidence,  and  is  opposed  to  the  uniform  tradition 
of  the  Church  up  to  that  time.  Dionysius  begins,  as  I  have 
already  told  you,  by  speaking  of  the  objections  which  some 
of  his  predecessors  had  raised  against  the  authority  of  the 
book.  '  But,  for  my  part,'  he  proceeds,  '  I  do  not  venture  to 
reject  the  book,  since  many  of  the  brethren  hold  it  in  esteem  ; 
but  I  take  it  to  be  above  my  understanding  to  comprehend  it, 
and  I  conceive  the  interpretation  of  each  several  part  to  be 
hidden  and  marvellous.  For,  though  I  do  not  understand, 
yet  I  surmise  that  some  deeper  meaning  underlies  the  words. 
These  things  I  do  not  measure  and  judge  by  my  own  reason 
ing  ;  but,  giving  the  chief  place  to  faith,  I  am  of  opinion  that 
they  are  too  high  for  me  to  comprehend.  I  believe  also  the 
author's  name  to  be  John,  for  he  himself  says  so,  but  I  cannot 
easily  grant  him  to  be  the  Apostle,  the  son  of  Zebedee,  whose 
is  the  Gospel  that  is  inscribed  "  according  to  John,"  and  the 
Catholic  Epistle,  for  I  infer  from  the  tone  (5#os)  of  each,  and 
the  character  of  the  language,  and  from  what  is  called  the 
Sie£aya>yry  of  the  book  [general  method],  that  he  is  not  the 
same  person.'  The  arguments  which  Dionysius  then  pro 
ceeds  to  urge  are,  first,  that  the  Evangelist  mentions  his 
name  neither  in  the  Gospel  nor  in  the  First  Epistle,  and  in 
the  other  two  Epistles  only  calls  himself  the  Elder,  while  the 
author  of  the  Apocalypse  calls  himself  John  three  times  in 
the  first  chapter  and  once  in  the  last :  but  never  calls  himself 
the  disciple  whom  Jesus  loved,  or  the  brother  of  James,  or 
the  man  who  had  seen  and  heard  the  Lord.  It  is  to  be  sup 
posed  that  there  were  many  of  the  name  of  John,  as,  for  ex 
ample,  we  read  of  John  Mark  in  the  Acts.  Many  who  admired 
John,  no  doubt,  gave  the  name  to  their  children  for  the  love 
they  bore  him,  just  as  many  of  the  faithful  now  call  their 
children  by  the  names  of  Peter  and  Paul.  '  And  it  is  said 
that  there  are  two  tombs  at  Ephesus,  each  bearing  the  name 
of  John's  tomb.'  He  next  argues  that  there  is  great  similarity 
of  style  between  the  Gospel  and  Epistle,  and  a  number  of 


XIII.]  DIONYSIUS   OF   ALEXANDRIA.  233 

expressions  common  to  both,  such  as  life,  light,  the  avoiding 
of  darkness,  with  the  commandment  of  love  one  towards 
another,  &c.,  none  of  which  are  to  be  found  in  the  Revela 
tion,  which  has  not  a  syllable  in  common  with  the  other  two  : 
that  Paul  in  his  Epistles  mentions  having  been  favoured  with 
revelations,  and  that  there  is  no  corresponding  mention  in  the 
Epistle  of  St.  John.  Lastly,  he  presses  the  argument  from 
the  difference  of  style  :  '  The  Gospel  and  Epistle,'  he  says, 
*  are  written  not  only  without  offending  against  the  Greek 
language,  but  even  most  eloquently  in  point  of  expression, 
reasoning,  and  literary  construction,  far  from  containing  any 
barbarous  word,  or  solecism,  or  vulgarism.  For  the  Apostle, 
it  seems,  possessed  either  word,  even  as  God  gave  him  both 
— the  word  of  knowledge  and  the  word  of  language  ;  but  as 
for  this  writer,  that  he  saw  a  revelation  arid  received  know 
ledge  and  prophecy,  I  will  not  gainsay  ;  yet  I  perceive  his 
dialect  and  tongue  to  be  not  accurately  Greek,  nay,  that  he 
uses  barbarous  idioms,  and  in  some  cases  even  solecisms, 
instances  whereof  it  needs  not  that  I  should  now  detail ;  for 
neither  have  I  mentioned  them  in  ridicule — let  no  one  sup 
pose  it — but  only  as  criticizing  the  dissimilarity  of  the  books' 
(Euseb.  H.  E.  vii.  25). 

This  passage  contains  all  the  arguments  used  by  modern 
writers  against  the  common  authorship  of  Gospel  and  Apoca 
lypse,  except  one  which  I  have  already  answered,  namely,  that 
the  Apocalypse  is  the  work  of  a  Judaizing  Christian,  the 
Gospel  that  of  one  of  ultra-Pauline  liberality.  I  have  shown 
that  in  this  respect  the  Apocalypse  is  completely  Pauline  (see 
P-  3o). 

I  do  not  think  it  necessary  to  spend  much  time  on  the  first 
argument  of  Dionysius,  viz.  that  founded  on  the  fact  that  the 
author  of  the  Apocalypse  has  given  his  name,  both  in  the  first 
and  third  person,  while  both  Gospel  and  Epistle  are  anony 
mous.  In  such  a  matter  it  is  very  possible  that  the  same  man 
might  act  differently  on  different  occasions,  even  though  we 
could  assign  no  reason  for  his  change  of  conduct.  But  in  this 
case  a  sufficient  reason  can  be  given.  In  the  Old  Testament 
the  rule  is  that  the  historical  books  (with  the  exception, 
indeed,  of  the  Book  of  Nehemiah)  are  all  anonymous ;  but 


234  THE   JOHANNINE    BOOKS.  [XIII. 

every  prophetical  book,  without  any  exception,  gives  the 
name  of  the  prophet  to  whom  the  vision  or  prophecy  was 
communicated.  The  whole  Book  of  the  Revelation  is  framed 
on  the  model  of  the  Old  Testament  prophecies,  so  that  it  is 
a  matter  of  course  that  it  should  begin  by  naming  the  seer 
whose  visions  are  recorded,  while  it  would  be  quite  natural 
that  a  historical  book  by  the  same  author  should  be  anony 
mous.*  Nor  can  more  stress  be  laid  on  the  remark  that  John 
does  not  in  the  Apocalypse  call  himself  an  Apostle,  or  the 
disciple  whom  Jesus  loved.  The  simplicity  of  the  language 
*  I  John,'  without  further  description  of  the  writer,  is,  when 
well  considered,  rather  a  proof  of  Apostolic  authority.  A 
writer  personating  the  Apostle  would  have  taken  care  to 
make  the  Apostleship  unmistakeably  plain  to  the  reader :  and 
another  John  writing  with  an  honest  purpose  would  have 
distinguished  himself  plainly  from  John  the  Apostle.  But 
this  author  betrays  no  desire  to  make  himself  prominent ; 
and  the  idea  of  any  other  person  being  mistaken  for  him 
does  not  seem  to  have  crossed  his  mind. 

Very  much  more  consideration  is  due  to  the  argument 
which  Dionysius  founded  on  the  difference  of  language  be 
tween  the  Revelation  and  the  other  Johannine  books.  Thus, 
he  says,  we  do  not  find  in  the  Revelation  the  Johannine 
words,  £<o>7,  <£u>s,  dA.rj$€ia,  x°LPL<>>  K/H'O-IS,  &c.  It  must  be  owned 
that,  whereas  the  likeness  between  the  language  of  the  Gospel 
and  of  the  First  Epistle  is  such  that  even  a  careless  reader 
can  hardly  fail  to  notice  it,  there  are  several  of  the  words 
frequently  occurring  in  the  other  Johannine  books  which  are 
either  rare  in  the  Apocalypse  or  absent  from  it.  But  then  it 
must  be  remembered  how  completely  different  the  subjects 
treated  of  in  the  Apocalypse  are  from  those  which  are  dealt 
with  in  the  other  books.  It  is  not  wonderful  that  a  writer 
should  use  different  words  when  he  wants  to  express  an 
entirely  new  circle  of  ideas.  On  the  other  hand,  when  we 
look  beyond  the  superficial  aspects  of  the  books,  and  care 
fully  examine  their  language,  we  arrive  at  a  result  quite 

*  The  transition  from  the  third  to  the  first  person  '  his  servant  John ' 
(i.  i),  'I  John'  (i.  9,  xxi.  2,  xxii.  2),  is  exactly  parallel  to  the  usage  of 
Isaiah  (i.  i,  ii.  i,  vi.  i,  &c.),  and  of  Daniel  (i.  6,  vii.  i,  2,  15,  &c.). 


XIII.]  THE    DICTION   OF   THE   APOCALYPSE.  235 

different  from  that  obtained  by  Dionysius.  There  is  found 
to  be  so  much  affinity  both  of  thought  and  diction  between 
the  various  books  which  have  been  ascribed  to  John,  that  we 
can  feel  confident  that  all  must  have  proceeded,  if  not  from 
the  same  author,  from  the  same  school. 

I  proceed  to  lay  before  you  some  of  the  proofs  that,  if  we 
adopt  the  now  pretty  generally  accepted  opinion  that  John 
the  Apostle  wrote  the  Apocalypse,  we  shall  find  ourselves 
bound  to  hold  that  the  Gospel  was  written  either  by  the 
Apostle  himself,  or  by  a  disciple  of  his  who  had  not  only 
thoroughly  adopted  his  master's  doctrine,  but  even  much  of 
his  language.  I  have  spoken  already  of  the  identity  of  the 
Christology  of  the  Apocalypse  with  that  of  the  Gospel,  the 
doctrine  of  our  Lord's  pre-existence  being  taught  as  dis 
tinctly  in  the  former  (e.g.  iii.  14)  as  in  the  latter.  I  have 
shown  (p.  31)  that  the  Book  of  the  Revelation  refuses  to  own 
the  unbelieving  Jews  as  true  Jews.  This,  also,  is  in  complete 
harmony  with  John  viii.  39,  which  refuses  to  recognize  as 
children  of  Abraham  those  who  did  not  the  works  of  Abraham. 
Let  me  now  direct  your  attention  to  the  title  given  to  our  Lord 
in  the  Apocalypse  (xix.  13),  the  'Word  of  God,'  which  at  once 
connects  that  book  with  the  Gospel  and  the  Epistle.  The 
Logos  doctrine  of  the  Gospel  has  been  considered  as  a  mark 
of  late  authorship,  or  at  least  as  indicating  an  author  more 
subject  to  Alexandrian  influences  than  the  historical  John  is 
likely  to  have  been.  On  that  subject  I  have  spoken  already 
(p.  73).  But  now  we  find  that  in  the  Apocalypse,  which  is 
admitted  by  Renan  and  by  a  host  of  Rationalist  writers  to  be 
the  work  of  John,  and  to  which  they  assign  an  earlier  date 
than  orthodox  critics  had  claimed  for  any  of  the  Johannine 
books,  this  very  title  '  Logos '  is  given  to  the  Saviour.  All 
objection,  therefore,  against  the  likelihood  of  the  Apostle 
having  used  this  title  at  once  disappears.  A  second  title 
repeatedly  given  to  our  Lord  in  the  Book  of  the  Revelation 
is  the  Lamb.  Nowhere  else  in  Scripture  is  it  used  thus  as  a 
title  of  the  Saviour,  except  in  the  first  chapter  of  the  Gospel — 
'Behold  the  Lamb  of  God.'  It  is  scarcely  necessary  for  me 
to  call  your  attention  to  the  sacrificial  import  of  this  title. 
The  two  books  elsewhere  (John  xi.  51,  52;  Rev.  v.  9)  un- 


236  THE   JOHANNINE    BOOKS. 

equivocally  express  the  same  doctrine,  which  can  be  stated 
in  words  which  I  am  persuaded  John  had  read :  'Ye  were  not 
redeemed  with  corruptible  things,  as  silver  and  gold,  from 
your  vain  conversation  received  by  tradition  from  your  fathers ; 
but  with  the  precious  blood  of  Christ,  as  of  a  lamb  without 
blemish  and  without  spot'  (i  Pet.  i.  18,  19).^  It  is  plain 
what  dignity  must  have  been  ascribed  to  the  person  of 
Him  to  whose  death  such  far-reaching  efficacy  is  attri 
buted. 

We  have  in  the  beginning  of  the  Revelation  (i.  7) :  'Every 
eye  shall  see  Him,  and  they  also  which  pierced  Him.'  Now 
the  piercing  of  our  Lord  is  only  recorded  by  St.  John  ;  and  in 
this  passage  the  prophet  Zechariah  is  quoted  in  a  form  differ 
ing  from  the  Septuagint,  but  agreeing  with  the  Gospel.  We 
have  repeatedly  the  phrase  'he  that  overcometh,'  which  is  of 
frequent  occurrence  in  all  the  Johannine  books  :  Rev.  ii.  7,  1 1, 
iii.  5,  xii.  n,  xxi.  7;  John  xvi.  33  ;  i  John  ii.  13,  iv.  4,  v.  4. 
The  remarkable  word  aXyOivos  occurs  nine  times  in  the  Gos 
pel,  four  times  in  the  Epistle,  ten  times  in  the  Revelation, 
and  only  five  times  in  all  the  rest  of  the  New  Testament. 
Similar  evidence  may  be  drawn  from  the  prevalence  of  the 
words  /xaprvpeou  and  /xaprvpta  in  all  the  Johannine  books.  In 
the  Revelation  (ii.  17)  Jesus  promises  believers  'the  hidden 
manna;'  in  the  Gospel  (referring  also  to  the  manna)  'the 
true  bread  from  heaven'  (John  vi.  32).  In  the  Gospel  (vii.  37) 
Jesus  cries,  'If  any  man  thirst,  let  him  come  unto  Me  and 
drink;'  in  the  Apocalypse  (xxii.  17),  'Let  him  that  is  athirst 
come ;  and  whosoever  will,  let  him  take  of  the  water  of  life 
freely.' f  The  abiding  of  God  with  man  is  in  both  books  pre- 

*  This  is  one  of  several  coincidences  between  Peter's  Epistle  and  the 
Johannine  books  :  i  Pet.  ii.  5,  9,  Rev.  i.  6  ;  I  Pet.  v.  13,  Rev.  xiv.  8, 
xvii.  5  ;  i  Pet.  i.  7,  13,  Rev.  i.  r,  iii.  18 ;  i  Pet.  i.  23,  i  John  iii.  9, 
John  i.  13,  iii.  5;  i  Pet.  i.  22,  i  John  iii.  3;  I  Pet.  v.  2,  John  x.  n,  xxi.  16; 

1  Pet.  iii.   18,   i  John  iii.  7;    I  Pet.  i.   10,  John  xii.  41;    I  Pet.  v.    13, 

2  John  i.     These  coincidences  seem  to  me  more  than  accidental.     When 
I  come  to  treat  of  Peter's  Epistle  I  will  give  my  reasons  for  preferring  the 
explanation  that  John  had  read  that  Epistle  to  the  supposition  that  the 
Epistle  is  post-Johannine. 

t  Other  coincidences  are:  ovoji/oiV,  John  i.  14,  Rev.  vii.  15,  xii.  12, 
xiii.  6,  xxi.  3  ;  'Lord,  thou  knowest,'  Rev.  vii.  14,  John  xxi.  15-17-'  *Xeiv 
fj.€pos  (=  to  partake),  John  xiii.  8,  Rev.  xx.  6;  ff^drrfiv,  i  John  iii.  12, 
Rev.  v.  6,  9,  12,  vi.  4,  9,  xiii.  3,  8,  xviii.  24;  fyis,  John  vii.  24,  xi.  44, 


XIII.]  THE    DICTION   OF    THE   APOCALYPSE.  237 

sented  as  the  issue  of  Christ's  work  (John  xiv.  23  ;  Rev.  iii.  20, 
xxi.  3). 

I  have  produced  instances  enough  to  establish  decisively 
that  there  is  the  closest  possible  affinity  between  the  Revela 
tion  and  the  other  Johannine  books.  The  only  question  on 
which  there  is  room  for  controversy  is  whether  that  affinity  is 
such  as  by  itself  to  be  a  sufficient  proof  of  identity  of  author 
ship.  In  deciding  on  this  question  attention  ought  of  course 
to  be  paid  to  the  differences  that  have  been  pointed  out.  For 
example,  our  Lord's  title  is  the  'Word  of  God'  in  the  Reve 
lation  ;  simply  the  'Word'  in  the  Gospel.  Christ  is  the  Lamb 
in  both  books ;  but  in  the  Gospel  6  d/xvos,  in  the  Revelation 
TO  apviov  ;  but  the  latter  form  may  have  been  preferred  in  order 
to  give  more  point  to  the  opposition  which  in  the  latter  book 
constantly  prevails  between  TO  apviov  and  TO  Orjpiov.  In  the 
Gospel  there  is  a  manifest  reason  why  the  Baptist,  pointing 
to  Jesus,  should  use  the  masculine,  not  the  neuter.  So,  again, 
we  have  in  the  Revelation  'he  that  overcometh,'  absolutely; 
but  in  the  preceding  books  with  an  object:  'he  that  over 
cometh  the  world,'  &c.  There  are  likewise  peculiarities  of 
the  Gospel  which  are  absent  from  the  Apocalypse,  such  as 
the  use  of  Iva.  with  the  subjunctive  instead  of  the  ordinary 
construction  with  the  infinitive,  and  fondness  for  ovv  as  a  con 
necting-link  in  a  narrative.  It  would  be  important  to  discuss 
these  differences  if  I  were  contending  that  it  is  possible  by 
internal  evidence  alone  to  decide  between  the  hypothesis  that 
the  author  of  the  Gospel  was  the  same  as  the  author  of  the 
Revelation,  and  the  hypothesis  that  the  one  was  a  disciple 
and  imitator  of  the  other.  But  the  question  with  which  we 

Rev.  i.  16;  •njpeu'  rbv  \6yov,  Rev.  iii.  8,  10,  xxii.  7,  9,  John  viii.  51-55, 
xiv.  23,  24,  xv.  20,  xvii.  6,  I  John  ii.  5  ;  efipaiffTi  twice  in  the  Revelation, 
five  times  in  the  Gospel.  None  of  these  expressions  are  found  in  the  New 
Testament,  except  in  the  Johannine  books.  Christ  is  compared  to  a 
bridegroom,  John  iii.  29,  Rev.  xix.  7,  xxi.  2,  xxii.  17.  Other  examples 
will  be  found  in  Davidson,  whose  candour  here  and  elsewhere  in  fairly 
presenting  the  evidence  on  both  sides  is  worthy  of  all  praise.  Notwith 
standing  the  perversity  of  some  of  his  decisions,  and,  what  is  more  irri 
tating,  the  oracular  tone  of  infallibility  with  which  he  enunciates  his  private 
opinions  as  if  they  were  ascertained  facts,  Davidson  has  done  great 
service  to  English  students  by  collecting  a  mass  of  information  which  they 
will  not  easily  find  elsewhere. 


238  THE   JOHANNINE    BOOKS.  [XIII. 

are  actually  concerned  is  different:  it  is  whether  we  are  bound 
to  reject  the  very  strong  external  evidence  for  identity  of 
authorship,  on  the  ground  that  internal  evidence  demonstrates 
that  both  works  could  not  have  had  the  same  author.  I  have 
shown  that  no  such  result  can  be  obtained  under  the  present 
head  of  argument,  the  resemblances  between  the  books  being 
far  more  striking  than  the  differences.  I  suppose  there  are 
no  two  works  of  the  same  author  between  which  some  points 
of  difference  might  not  be  found  by  a  minute  critic,  especially 
if  the  works  were  written  at  some  distance  of  time  from  each 
other.  No  two  books  can  be  more  alike  than  the  First  and 
Second  Epistles  of  St.  John ;  eight  of  the  thirteen  verses  of 
which  the  latter  consists  are  to  be  found  in  the  former,  either 
in  sense  or  expression.  Yet  Davidson  is  careful  to  show  that 
a  minute  critic  would  be  at  no  loss  for  proofs  of  diversity  of 
authorship.  The  one  has  ct  TIS,  the  other  lav  TL<S  ;  the  one 
ep^o/xevov  ev  <rap/a,  the  Other  eXyXvOora.  ev  crap/a,  and  SO  on. 
Some  years  ago  Dr.  Stanley  Leathes*  applied  to  our  English 
poets  the  methods  of  minute  criticism  that  have  been  freely 
used  on  our  sacred  books.  He  found  that  of  about  450  words 
in  Milton's  L' Allegro,  over  300  are  not  to  be  found  in  the 
longer  poem  //  Penseroso,  and  over  300  do  not  occur  in  the 
still  longer  poem  Lycidas.  So  likewise,  of  about  590  words  in 
Tennyson's  Lotos-eaters,  there  are  360  which  are  not  found  in 
the  longer  poem  (Enone. 

I  pass  to  the  last  and  strongest  of  the  arguments  of  Dio- 
nysius :  that  drawn  from  the  solecisms  of  style.  The  Gospel 
and  First  Epistle  are  written  in  what,  if  not  classical  Greek, 
is  smooth,  unexceptionable,  and  free  from  barbarisms  and 
solecisms  in  grammar.  The  Greek  of  the  Revelation  is  start 
ling  from  the  first :  John  to  the  seven  Churches  of  Asia,  grace 
to  you  and  peace  O.TTO  6  wv  KOU  6  rjv  KOL  6  epxo//,ei/o?,  and  from 
the  seven  spirits  which  are  before  his  throne  KOL  aV6  ' 
Xptorrov  6  /xaprvs  6  TTKTTOS,  to  him  that  loved  US  T<3 
rjjjias  KOL  \ovcravTL  i^ua?  /cat  tiroiiqa-ev  ^/xas  j3a<TL\€iav.  Instances  of 
false  apposition  such  as  occur  in  this  example  present  them 
selves  several  times  where  a  noun  in  a  dependent  case  has  a 

*  Boyle  Lectures,  1868,  p.  283. 


XIII.]  THE   DICTION    OF   THE   APOCALYPSE.  239 

nominative  in  apposition  with  it.*  It  is  not  worth  while  to 
discuss  other  deviations  from  Greek  usage,  several  that  have 
been  noticed  not  being  peculiar  to  the  Apocalypse. 

Some  well-meaning  critics  have  set  themselves  to  exten 
uate  these  irregularities,  and  they  have  at  least  succeeded  in 
showing  that  some  considerable  deductions  ought  fairly  to  be 
made  from  the  list.  They  have  produced  from  classical  writers 
examples  of  anacoluthon,  of  false  apposition,  of  construction 
ad  sensum ;  and  it  is  urged  with  reason  that  we  are  not  to 
expect  in  the  abrupt  utterances  of  a  'rapt  seer,  borne  from 
vision  to  vision/  a  regard  for  strict  grammatical  regularity, 
which  is  frequently  neglected  in  calmer  compositions. 

At  the  revival  of  learning,  many  excellent  men  were  shocked 
at  the  assertion  of  scholars,  that  barbarisms  and  solecisms  were 
to  be  found  in  New  Testament  Greek  ;  and  those  who  were 
called  '  Purists '  endeavoured  to  clear  the  sacred  writers  from 
what  they  regarded  as  a  dishonouring  aspersion.  They  ought 
to  have  reflected  that  it  would  be  just  as  reasonable  to  main 
tain  that  the  sacred  writers  ought  to  have  been  empowered 
to  write  in  English,  as  in  any  kind  of  Greek  save  that  which 
was  spoken  at  the  time  and  in  the  place  in  which  they  lived. 
It  is  difficult  for  us  now  to  imagine  how  anyone  could  have 
persuaded  himself  to  think  that  a  miracle  must  needs  have 
been  wrought  to  enable  the  sacred  writers  to  use  a  language 
not  their  own,  thus  obliterating  the  evidence  which  the 
character  of  the  style  bears  to  the  time  and  circumstances 
under  which  the  books  were  written. 

In  the  case  of  the  Apocalypse,  the  character  of  the  lan 
guage  corresponds  very  well  with  what  might  be  expected 
from  the  author  to  whom  it  is  ascribed.  It  gives  us  no  reason 
to  disbelieve  that  this  author  had  a  sufficiency  of  Greek  for 
colloquial  purposes.  His  anacolutha  do  not  prove  him  to  be 
ignorant  of  the  ordinary  rules  of  Greek  construction.  The 
very  rules  which  he  breaks  in  one  place  he  observes  in  others. 
The  use  of  such  a  phrase  as  d-n-o  6  &v  could  not  possibly  be  the 
result  of  ignorance  that  OLTTO  governs  the  genitive  case.  One 

*  Thus  :   TT)S   Kaivrjs  *lepovaa\ri/J.,  ?)  KaTafiaivovffa   (iii.  12),    VITO/JLOV^  rcav 
aytoiv  ol  r-npovvTfs  ras  fi>ro\ds  (xiv.   12),  ri>v  5/m/coj/ra,  b  ofyts 
(xx.  2). 


240  THE   JOHANNINE    BOOKS.  [XIII. 

who  could  make  such  a  mistake  through  ignorance  would  be 
incapable  of  writing  the  rest  of  the  book.  This  example  is 
rather  to  be  paralleled  by  *  I  AM  hath  sent  me,'  in  the  autho 
rized  version  of  Ex.  iii.  14.  This  very  text  seems  to  have 
suggested  the  6  <m/  of  St.  John,  while  6  rjv  is  a  bold  attempt 
to  supply  the  want  of  a  past  participle  of  the  substantive 
verb.  As  for  6  ep^o/xevo?,  there  may  possibly  be  a  reference 
to  our  Lord's  second  coming,  but  it  is  also  quite  possible 
that  the  form  eo-o/xcvo?,  which  only  occurs  once  N.  T.,  was 
not  familiar  to  the  writer.  As  there  may  be  a  great  difference 
between  the  copiousness  of  the  vocabulary  possessed  by  two 
persons  who  speak  the  same  language  (the  stock  of  words 
that  suffices  to  express  the  ideas  of  the  rustic  being  wholly 
inadequate  for  the  necessities  of  the  literary  man),  so  there 
may  be  equal  difference  in  respect  of  the  variety  of  gramma 
tical  forms  habitually  employed.  In  particular  there  is  sure 
to  be  such  a  difference  between  the  language  of  the  native 
and  that  of  the  foreigner.  One  who  learns  a  language  late 
in  life  finds  it  hard  to  obtain  a  mastery  of  any  complicated 
system  of  inflexions ;  and  this,  no  doubt,  is  why  we  find  that 
in  the  modern  languages  of  Europe  which  are  derived  from 
the  Latin  the  varieties  of  case  endings  have  been  in  great 
measure  obliterated.  We  can  thus  understand  how  it  is  that 
John,  accustomed  to  Aramaic  which  has  no  case  endings, 
though  not  ignorant  of  the  use  of  the  oblique  cases,  is  glad 
to  slide  back  into  the  use  of  the  nominative.  Then,  again, 
of  the  forms  known  to  grammarians  several  are  but  rarely 
needed  for  practical  use  ;  and  with  want  of  practice  the 
power  of  correct  use  is  apt  to  be  lost.  When  I  was  young, 
members  of  the  Society  of  Friends  affected  the  use  of  the 
second  person  singular,  but  its  use  elsewhere  had  become  so 
obsolete  that  they  were  unable  to  employ  it  grammatically. 
*  Thee '  became  a  nominative  case,  and  was  made  to  agree 
with  a  verb  in  the  third  person.*  A  foreigner  who  has  learned 
to  manipulate  correctly  the  grammatical  forms  which  are  of 

*  Tennyson  also  has  been  lately  accused  of  bad  grammar  in  his  use  of 
the  second  person  singular  by  employing  '  wert '  in  the  indicative  mood 
instead  of  «  wast.'  In  this  matter,  however,  he  is  kept  in  countenance  by 
several  preceding  poets. 


XIII.]  SOLECISMS    OF   THE    APOCALYPSE.  241 

frequent  occurrence  will  be  apt  to  find  them  insufficient  for 
his  needs  when  he  proceeds  to  literary  composition.  John, 
for  example,  might  be  in  the  constant  habit  of  employing  the 
participle  present,  and  yet  not  be  equally  familiar  with  the 
use  of  participles  future.  The  Apocalypse,  then,  is  exactly 
what  might  have  been  written  by  one  whose  native  language 
was  Aramaic,  who  was  able  to  use  Greek  for  the  ordinary 
purposes  of  life,  but  who  found  a  strain  put  on  his  knowledge 
of  the  language  when  he  desired  to  make  a  literary  use  of  it. 

But  how  is  it  then  that  the  Greek  of  the  Gospel  should 
be  so  much  better,  if  both  books  were  written  by  the  same 
author  ?  I  am  not  sure  that  the  Greek  of  the  Gospel  does 
display  so  very  much  wider  a  knowledge  of  grammatical 
forms.  A  grammarian  does  not  find  so  much  at  which  to 
take  exception  ;  but  this  may  be  because  less  has  been 
attempted.  It  is  much  easier  to  turn  into  another  language 
such  sentences  as  '  In  the  beginning  was  the  Word,'  &c., 
than  such  a  phrase  as  '  which  is,  and  which  was,  and  which  is 
to  come.'  It  is  on  account  of  this  more  restricted  range  of 
grammatical  forms  that  the  Gospel  of  St.  John  has  been  so 
often  used  as  the  first  book  of  a  beginner  learning  a  foreign 
language.* 

But  without  extenuating  too  much  the  superiority  of  the 
Greek  of  the  Gospel  over  that  of  the  Revelation,  two  ex 
planations  of  that  difference  can  be  given.  The  opinion  of 
critics,  orthodox  as  well  as  sceptical,  now  tends  to  reverse  the 
doctrine  of  older  writers  which  made  the  Apocalypse  much 
the  later  book  of  the  two,  and  to  give  it,  on  the  contrary,  ten, 
perhaps  twenty,  years  t}f  greater  antiquity  than  the  Gospel. 
Admit  that  St.  John  was  no  longer  young  when  he  came  to 
Ephesus,  and  therefore  that  no  very  radical  change  in  his 
language  was  to  be  expected  ;  still,  living  in  a  Greek  city, 
and  with  crowds  of  Greek  disciples  about  him  to  whom  he 
would  daily  have  to  expound  his  doctrines  in  their  own 

*  Canon  Westcott  says  in  his  Introduction  (p.  1),  which  I  had  not  read 
when  I  wrote  the  above  :  '  To  speak  of  St.  John's  Gospel  as  "  written  in 
very  pure  Greek"  is  altogether  misleading.  It  is  free  from  solecisms, 
because  it  avoids  all  idiomatic  expressions.'  And  he  gees  on  to  remark 
that  there  is  at  most  one  instance  of  the  use  of  the  oratio  aibliqua. 


242  THE   JOHANNINE    BOOKS.  [XIII. 

language,  he  could  not  fail  to  acquire  greater  facility  in  its 
use,  and  a  power  of  expressing  his  ideas  such  as  he  had  not 
possessed  when  he  had  merely  used  the  language  for  ordinary 
colloquial  purposes.  There  would  have  been  fair  ground  for 
suspicion,  if  there  had  been  no  superiority  over  the  Greek  of 
the  Apocalypse,  in  a  book  written  after  a  score  of  years, 
during  which  the  author  was  speaking  little  or  no  Aramaic, 
and  must  have  been  habitually  speaking  Greek. 

The  second  consideration  is  that  of  possible  assistance. 
I  have  known  two  letters  sent  to  the  Continent  bearing 
the  same  signature  written  in  the  same  foreign  language, 
but  possibly  differing  from  each  other  in  grammatical  accu 
racy  as  much  as  the  Gospel  and  Apocalypse  ;  and  the  expla 
nation  was  not  that  the  writer  was  different,  but  only  that,  in 
the  one  case,  not  in  the  other,  he  had  taken  the  precaution 
before  sending  his  composition  to  get  it  looked  over  by  a 
better  linguist  than  himself.  St.  Paul,  we  know,  habitually 
used  the  services  of  an  amanuensis  ;  so  also  may  St.  John  ; 
and  for  all  we  know  the  disciple  may  have  been  a  better 
Greek  scholar  than  his  master.  If  a  solecism  were  dictated 
to  him  he  might  silently  correct  it  (as  we  find  that  in  the 
later  MSS.  scribes  have  corrected  several  in  the  Apocalypse), 
or  he  might  at  least  call  his  master's  attention  to  it.  The 
linguistic  differences,  therefore,  between  the  Apocalypse  and 
the  Gospel  could  all  be  accounted  for  by  the  supposition  that 
John  wrote  the  former  book  with  his  own  hand,  and  in  the 
latter  employed  the  services  of  an  amanuensis.  In  short, 
when  we  compare  the  books  in  an  English  translation,  we 
find  the  marks  of  common  authorship  predominate  :  it  is  when 
we  look  at  them  in  the  Greek  that  we  are  struck  by  a  dif 
ference.  May  not  the  explanation  be,  that  the  Apostle  thought 
in  Aramaic,  and  that  his  thoughts  were  rendered  into  Greek 
by  different  hands  ? 

Such  explanations  being  available,  the  differences  of  lan 
guage  that  have  been  pointed  out  come  very  far  short  of 
demonstrating  diversity  of  authorship.  The  conclusion,  then, 
to  which  I  consider  we  are  led  by  a  comparative  study  of  the 
books  is,  that  the  Apocalypse  and  the  other  Johannine  books 
clearly  belong  to  the  same  school :  the  first  is  as  closely  re- 


XIV.]  THE   DATE   OF  THE  APOCALYPSE.  243 

lated  to  the  rest  as  the  Epistle  to  the  Hebrews  is  to  St.  Paul's 
Epistles.  If  we  regard  the  evidence  from  language  solely,  I 
do  not  think  we  are  in  a  position  either  to  affirm  or  deny  that 
the  same  man  wrote  all  the  books.  There  are  resemblances 
between  them  such  as  to  make  it  very  credible  that  it  was  so  ; 
but  at  the  same  time  there  are  differences  which  indicate  that 
the  Revelation  must  at  least  have  been  written  at  a  different 
time  or  under  different  circumstances  from  the  others.  Some 
other  topics  of  internal  evidence  will  afterwards  come  under 
consideration. 


XIV. 

PART    III. 

THE   DATE    OF   THE  APOCALYPSE. 

IT  will  be  convenient  if  before  proceeding  further  I  state  in 
more  detail  the  modern  theory  as  to  the  date  of  the  Book  of 
the  Revelation.  I  have  already  said  that  modern  critics,  who 
agree  with  Dionysius  in  assigning  the  Gospel  and  Apocalypse 
to  different  authors,  differ  from  him  by  claiming  Apostolic 
authority  for  the  latter,  not  the  former.  And  in  this  case  we 
have  the  singular  instance  of  sceptical  critics  assigning  to  a 
New  Testament  book  an  earlier  date  than  the  orthodox  had 
claimed  for  it.  The  latter,  following  Irenasus,  had  assigned 
the  Apocalypse  to  the  reign  of  Domitian,  and  had  regarded 
it  as  the  last  work  of  the  Apostle  John,  written  in  extreme 
old  age.  Modern  critics,  on  the  other  hand,  are  willing  to 
grant  the  book  a  quarter  of  a  century  of  greater  antiquity. 
From  the  verse  xvii.  10,  *  There  are  seven  kings:  five  are 
fallen,  and  one  is,  and  the  other  is  not  yet  come,'  they 
infer  that  the  book  was  written  after  the  death  of  five  Roman 
emperors,  and  during  the  reign  of  the  sixth.  There  is  a 
difference  in  the  way  of  counting  Roman  emperors,  which, 
however,  is  made  not  to  affect  the  result.  If  we  begin  the 
reckoning  with  Augustus,  Nero  is  the  fifth,  shortly  after 
whose  death  the  book  is  supposed  to  be  written.  In  fact  this 

R  2 


244  THE   JOHANNINE   BOOKS.  [XIV. 

fixes  the  date  within  very  narrow  limits,  for  the  reign  of  Galba 
only  lasted  from  May  68  to  January  69.  The  more  usual 
computation  made  Julius  the  first  of  Roman  emperors,*  and 
this  is  adopted  by  Renan  ;  but  the  date  which  he  assigns  the 
book  is  the  same ;  for  his  theory  is,  that  though  Nero  was 
really  dead  at  the  time,  he  was  supposed  by  the  author  of  the 
book  to  be  still  living,  so  that  the  five  kings  then  dead  were 
Nero's  five  predecessors. 

The  disappearance  of  Nero  was  so  sudden,  and  his  death 
witnessed  by  so  few  persons,  that  vague  rumours  got  abroad, 
especially  in  Asia  and  Achaia,  that  he  was  not  really  dead. 
Tacitus  tells  us  (Hist.  ii.  8,  9)  that  an  impostor  speedily  took 
advantage  of  this  state  of  feeling.  He  is  said  to  have  been 
of  servile  origin,  was  like  Nero  in  personal  appearance,  and 
had  the  same  musical  skill.  Giving  himself  out  to  be  the 
emperor,  he  got  some  followers  about  him,  and  established 
himself  in  a  little  local  sovereignty,  the  centre  of  his  power 
being  Cythnos  (one  of  the  Cyclades  not  far  from  Patmos),  to 
which  island  he  had  been  driven  by  tempests  when  crossing 
the  sea.  But  his  power  was  of  short  duration ;  for  he  was 
slain  early  in  the  reign  of  Otho,  and  his  body  was  sent  round 
to  different  cities,  in  order  completely  to  dispel  the  delusion 
which  he  had  excited.  Some  twenty  years  later,  however, 
there  was  again  talk  of  a  false  Nero,  the  pretender  this  time 
having  presented  himself  in  Parthia,  where  he  obtained  cre 
dence,  protection,  and  support  (Suet.,  Nero,  57).  The  belief 
that  the  matricide  Nero  had  fled  beyond  the  Euphrates  is 
expressed  in  the  Sibylline  books,  iv.  119,  137,  and  accord 
ingly  the  book  containing  the  verses  referred  to  is  judged  to 
be  a  Jewish  composition  of  the  date  80  or  90.  Now  the 
Apocalyptist  is  regarded  by  Renan  and  the  other  interpreters 
of  the  same  school  as  having  shared  this  belief  about  Nero. 
This  is  what  is  supposed  to  be  implied  in  the  verses  xiii.  3, 
12,  14  :  'I  saw  one  of  his  heads  as  it  were  wounded  to  death  ; 
and  his  deadly  wound  was  healed  ; '  and  again,  xvii.  1 1  :  '  The 
beast  that  was,  and  is  not,  even  he  is  the  eighth,  and  is  of  the 
seven,  and  goeth  into  perdition,'  which  is  interpreted  to  mean 

*  See  the  authorities  quoted  by  Renan,  U Antechrist,  p.  407. 


xiv.]        KENAN'S  THEORY  AS  TO  THE  APOCALYPSE.  245 

that  Nero,  one  of  the  seven  emperors,  was  to  return  and  rule 
for  a  time  as  the  eighth.  The  mention  of  the  kings  of  the 
East,  xvi.  12,  is  interpreted  as  containing  a  reference  to  the 
Parthians,  by  whose  aid  Nero  was  to  be  restored.* 

This  is  the  theory  which  is  elaborated  in  Kenan's  fourth 
volume  (L? Ante christ}.  It  was  at  once  accepted  by  a  writer 
in  the  Edinburgh  Review  (Oct.,  1874),  whom  I  imagined  at  the 
time  (I  do  not  know  whether  or  not  correctly)  to  be  Dean 
Stanley  ;  and  more  recently  by  Archdeacon  Farrar  (Expositor, 
1881).  Kenan's  view,  and  it  is  that  most  popular  among 
Rationalist  critics,  is  that  this  work  was  written  by  the 
Apostle  John  at  Ephesus  in  that  crisis  which  agitated  every 
Jewish  mind,  the  great  Jewish  war  with  the  Romans,  in  the 
end  of  the  year  68  or  beginning  of  69,  a  couple  of  years 
before  the  destruction  of  Jerusalem.  What  the  seer  is  sup 
posed  to  anticipate  and  to  predict  in  the  beginning  of  the 
eleventh  chapter  is  that  the  siege  would  to  a  certain  extent  be 
successful,  and  the  city  be  trodden  under  foot  of  the  Gentiles 
for  three  years  and  a-half ;  but  that  the  Temple  should  not  be 
taken,  for  that  our  Lord's  second  coming  should  rescue  the 
Jews  and  be  accompanied  by  the  destruction  of  Rome. 

The  '  beast '  of  the  Revelation  is  said  to  be  Nero,  and 
Renan  has  revelled  in  the  accumulation  of  a  multitude  of 
offensive  details,  which  have  been  faithfully  transcribed  by 
his  English  followers,  with  the  view  of  showing  how  applicable 
the  title  of  wild  beast  was  to  that  monster.  But,  in  my  opinion, 
no  one  who  compares  the  Book  of  Daniel  with  the  Apocalypse 
will  require  any  ingenious  explanation  of  the  use  of  the  imagery 
of  beasts  in  the  latter  book  beyond  the  fact  that  it  occurs  in 
the  former.  It  is  supposed,  however,  that  all  doubt  has  been 
now  removed  through  the  discovery  in  quite  recent  times  of 

*  I  note  here  that  it  is  an  attempt  to  combine  inconsistent  hypotheses 
when  quotations  are  accumulated  which  speak  of  the  belief  that  Nero  had 
fled  to  Parthia,  and  when  this  belief  is  ascribed  to  the  Apocalyptist.  For 
we  only  hear  of  Parthia  in  connexion  with  Nero  full  twenty  years  after 
that  emperor's  death  ;  and  naturally  it  would  not  be  until  after  all  trace  of 
him  had  disappeared  from  the  West  that  the  imagination  would  spring  up 
that  he  was  hiding  in  the  distant  East.  If,  as  Renan  would  have  it,  John 
wrote  in  the  reign  of  Galba,  and  believed  the  impostor  of  Cythnos  to  be 
the  veritable  Nero  redivivus,  he  could  not  albo  believe  Nero  to  be  then 
lurking  in  Parthia.  On  this  subject  may  be  consulted  Arnold,  Die  Nero- 
nische  Christenverfolgung,  sect.  viii. 


246  THE   JOHANNINE    BOOKS.  [XIV. 

the  true  explanation  of  the  mysterious  number  666.*  This  is 
said  to  be  Nero  Caesar  written  in  Hebrew  letters  *")Dp  ]1"0-t 
And  what  is  supposed  to  demonstrate  the  correctness  of  this 
solution  is,  that  it  accounts  equally  for  the  numbers  666  and 
6 1 6,  both  of  which  were  early  found  in  MSS.  of  the  Apocalypse 
(see  p.  224).  For  the  difference  is  explained  as  arising  from 
a  difference  in  the  way  of  spelling  Ne/awv  with  or  without  the 
final  letter,  the  numerical  value  of  which  in  Hebrew  is  50. 

Who  the  false  prophet  was,  who  is  described  (xiii.  n,  xix. 
20)  as  working  miracles  and  compelling  men  to  worship  the 
beast  and  receive  his  mark,  these  interpreters  are  less  agreed. 
One  (Volkmar)  gravely  maintains  that  the  person  intended 
is  St.  Paul,  who  by  instructing  Christians  (in  Rom.  xiii.)  to 
submit  to  the  higher  powers  had  made  himself  the  prophet 
of  Nero.     Another  suggests  that  it  might  be  the   historian 
Josephus.     A  third  contends  for  Simon  Magus.    Archdeacon 
Farrar  upholds  the  claims  of  the  emperor  Vespasian.     But 
these   modern    expositors    of  the   Apocalypse   all   agree   in 
putting  forward  an  interpretation  from  which  it  results  that 
the  book  is  in  every  sense  of  the  word  a  false  prophecy — a 
prediction  falsified  by  the  event.     It  foretold  that  Nero  was 
to  recover  his  power,  but  in  point  of  fact  he  was  then  dead ; 
it   foretold  (and   apparently  in  ignorance  of  the  prophecy 
which  Matthew  has  put  into  the  mouth  of  our  Lord)  that  the 
temple  should  not  be  taken  ;  but  actually  not  one  stone  of 
it  was  left  upon  another  ;    and,  finally,   it  foretold  that  the 
provinces  should  cast  off  the  Roman  domination  and  destroy 
the  imperial  city ;  for  this  is  the  interpretation  given  to  chap. 
xvi;.    6,  17 — the  ten  horns,  into  whose  heart  God  had  put  it 
for  a  time  to  give  their  kingdom  to  the  beast,  shall  now  hate 
the  whore,  make  her  desolate  and  naked,  eat  her  flesh,  and 
burn  her  with  fire.     But,  in  point  of  fact,  the  wars  that  fol 
lowed  the  death  of  Nero  had  no  such  result.    On  the  contrary, 
under  the   Flavian   emperors,  the   dominion  of  Rome  was 
more  firmly  established  than  ever. 

*  There  are  rival  claimants  for  the  honour  of  this  discovery — Fritzsche, 
JBenary,  Reuss,  and  Hitzig.  See  Farrar,  Expositor,  p.  347. 

t  Thus  :  i  =  50, 1  =  200,  1=6,  3-50,  p  =  100,  D  =  60,  n  =  200 ;  total 
=  666. 


XIV.]  THE   MODERN   THEORY   INCREDIBLE.  247 

I  confess  that  I  am  under  a  certain  disadvantage  in  criticizing 
any  theory  which  professes  to  give  the  true  interpretation  of 
the  Apocalypse,  for  I  have  to  own  myself  unable  to  give  any 
better  solution  of  my  own,  feeling  like  one  of  Cicero's  dispu 
tants,  '  facilius  me,  talibus  de  rebus,  quid  non  sentirem,  quam 
quid  sentirem,  posse  dicere.'  However,  I  am  bound  to  state 
the  difficulties  which  prevent  me  from  accepting  the  theory, 
now  becoming  fashionable,  as  furnishing  the  true  solution. 

And  it  seems  almost  enough  to  appeal  to  the  estimation  in 
which  the  Apocalypse  has  been  held  from  the  first.  Is  it  a 
credible  hypothesis  that  any  man  ever  gained  for  himself 
permanent  reputation  as  an  inspired  prophet  by  making  a 
prediction  which  was  falsified  within  a  year  of  the  time  when  it 
was  delivered  ?  According  to  this  theory,  St.  John  does  not, 
like  some  pretenders  to  the  gift  of  prophecy,  make  himself 
pretty  safe  by  postponing  to  some  tolerably  distant  future  the 
date  when  his  prophecy  is  to  come  to  pass.  He  undertakes 
boldly  to  foretell  the  event  of  the  great  military  operation  of 
his  time.  For  a  parallel  case  we  should  imagine  Victor  Hugo, 
or  some  other  French  prophet,  in  Christmas,  1870,  issuing  a 
prediction  that  Paris  should  to  a  certain  extent  be  taken,  and 
a  third  part  of  the  city  burnt,  but  that  the  Germans  should 
not  get  the  mastery  over  the  whole ;  for  that  there  would  be 
an  uprising  of  the  other  German  nations  against  the  Prussians, 
ending  with  the  total  destruction  of  the  city  of  Berlin,  to  the 
great  joy  of  Europe.  We  can  imagine  some  one  mad  enough 
to  make  such  a  prophecy  as  this ;  but  if  so,  can  we  imagine 
that  a  prediction  so  wild  and  so  unfortunate  should  make  the 
reputation  of  the  prophet,  and  that  the  book  which  contained 
it  should  live  for  generations  as  an  inspired  document  ?  In 
the  case  of  the  Apocalypse,  as  we  are  asked  to  understand  it, 
the  seer  could  hardly  have  had  time  to  publish  his  predictions 
before  he  must  have  himself  wished  to  recall  or  suppress 
them,  their  failure  was  so  rapid.  Possibly  within  a  month  after 
they  were  made  the  pretended  Nero  was  killed  and  his  im 
posture  exposed.  Then  came  a  rapid  succession  of  emperors, 
proving  that  it  was  a  mistake  to  limit  their  number  to  seven, 
and,  not  long  after,  the  destruction  of  Jerusalem,  from  which 
the  Temple  did  not  escape. 


H8  THE   JOHANNINE    BOOKS.  [XIV. 

According  to  this  theory,  too,  we  must  suppose  that  the 
intention  of  the  Apocalypse  was  understood  at  the  time  it  was 
published.  For  otherwise  what  object  could  there  be  in  the 
work  ?  It  was  intended,  we  are  told,  to  inspire  in  Christians 
certain  hopes  and  expectations ;  and  in  order  to  have  this 
effect,  its  general  purpose,  at  least,  must  have  been  made 
plain.  And  yet  the  knowledge  of  the  writer's  meaning  com 
pletely  perished.  Irenseus,  separated  from  the  book  by  only  one 
generation,  and  professing  to  be  able  to  report  the  tradition 
concerning  the  number  of  the  beast  handed  down  by  men  who 
had  seen  John  face  to  face,  is  utterly  ignorant  of  its  purport. 
The  solution  of  Nero  for  666  is  quite  unknown  to  him,  and 
he  is  so  far  from  connecting  the  book  with  the  times  of  Nero 
as  to  refer  the  work  to  the  reign  of  Domitian.*  He  has  not 
the  least  suspicion  that  recourse  is  to  be  had  to  the  Hebrew 
alphabet,  but  treats  it  as  a  self-evident  principle  that  Greek 
numerals  are  to  be  employed. f 

*  On  this  subject  Davidson  says  (Introduction,  i  276),  '  Irenaeus  calls 
the  emperor  Domitian  ;  Epiphanius  calls  him  Claudius  ;  the  Syriac  version 
of  the  Apocalypse,  Nero,  with  which  Theophylact  agrees.'  Davidson 
omitted  to  caution  his  readers  that  all  these  authorities  are  not  of  equal 
value,  but  I  find  it  not  superfluous  to  add  this  warning.  The  student 
cannot  too  early  learn  to  disregard  writers  cited  as  authorities,  if  they 
have  no  real  knowledge  of  the  matters  in  respect  of  which  their  testi 
mony  is  appealed  to.  In  the  present  case,  Irenaeus  deserves  to  be  listened 
to,  for  he  claims,  as  I  have  said,  to  be  able  to  report  the  testimony  of 
those  who  had  seen  John  face  to  face.  We  may  have  good  reasons  for 
rejecting  his  statement,  but  among  good  reasons  cannot  be  reckoned  the 
opposing  testimony  of  writers  whose  authority  in  opposition  to  his  is 
absolutely  insignificant.  Concerning  Epiphanius  I  have  spoken,  p.  168. 
He  probably  got  the  Claudian  date,  which  is  certainly  wrong,  from  the 
Apocryphal  act?-  of  Leucius,  which  will  be  described  in  a  later  lecture. 
The  Syriac  version  referred  to  is  certainly  not  earlier  than  the  sixth  cen 
tury,  and  there  is  no  evidence  to  show  that  the  superscription  which 
mentions  Nero  is  as  old  as  the  version.  Of  Theophylact,  it  is  enough  to 
say  that  he  lived  at  the  end  of  the  eleventh  century. 

"f  TOV  \6yov  SiSaffKovros  r)/*as,  OTI  6  apid/j.bs  TOV  bvou.a.Tos  TOV  Q-rjplov  Karat 
T^JV  TWV  'E\\T)i>uv  tyrifyov  Sia  TUV  ev  avT<£  •ypa/u/u.drcav  [e/X(/>au/eTai,  Euseb^ 
If.  E.  v.  8]  sexcentos  habebit  et  sexaginta  et  sex  (Lat.  trans.,  Iren.  v.  30). 
I  suspect  that  Eusebius,  in  abridging  his  extract,  has  slightly  distorted  the 
meaning.  He  makes  Irenaeus  say  that  reason  teaches  that  the  calculation 
must  be  made  by  Greek  letters,  which  seems  a  bold  assertion.  But  I  take 
it  that  what  Irenaeus  looks  on  as  established  by  the  arguments  he  has  used 
is,  that  the  numerical  value  of  the  Greek  letters  in  the  name  of  the  beast 
must  make,  not  616,  but  six  hundreds,  six  tens,  six  units.  But  either 
way  he  takes  for  granted,  without  doubt,  that  the  calculation  must  be 
made  by  Greek  numerals. 


XIV.]  IMPUTATION  OF  FAILURE,  HOW   DECLINED.  249 

The  argument  just  used,  that  permanent  reputation  could 
not  have  been  gained  by  a  prophecy  which  signally  failed, 
may  seem  to  lose  its  force  if  it  be  true  (as  the  Edinburgh 
Reviewer  contends)  that  St.  John's  prophecy,  as  he  under 
stands  it,  did  not  fail.  '  It  is  perfectly  certain,'  he  writes, 
'  that  Nero  did  not  in  fact  return ;  that  the  Roman  Empire 
did  not  in  fact  break  up  till  more  than  three  centuries 
later  ;  that  not  a  part  but  the  whole  of  Jerusalem  and  of  the 
Jewish  Temple  was  destroyed;  that  the  Second  Advent  of  our 
Lord  to  judgment  did  not  soon,  nay,  has  not  yet  occurred. 
But  in  spite  of  all  this,  we  venture  to  say  that  the  Apocalypse 
of  St.  John,  that  Hebrew  prophecy,  on  the  whole,  has  never 
theless  not  failed ;  that,  properly  understood,  its  forecasts 
have  been,  for  every  rational  and  religious  purpose,  success 
ful.'  And  he  goes  on  to  explain  that  it  is  religious  confidence 
in  God  which  is  the  essential  teaching  of  all  the  Hebrew 
books ;  that  in  the  Bible  *  all  ethical  speculation  is  reduced 
to  its  ultimate  and  most  practical  terminology  in  the  word 
"faith."  In  details  we  are  very  likely  to  be  entirely  mis 
taken,  but  they  who  have  believed  will  find  at  last  that  they 
were  not  deceived,  that  Christ,  not  Antichrist,  rules  the 
universe,  that  God  and  not  the  devil  is  supreme,  and  must  in 
the  end  be  triumphant.'  Mere  soothsaying,  we  are  told,  was 
never  in  any  marked  degree  the  intention  of  prophecy  at  all. 
But  when  'Apocalypse,'  which  may  be  called  the  decay,  the 
senility  of  prophecy,  began  to  busy  itself  with  mere  world- 
empires  and  with  the  political  succession  of  events,  it  cannot 
be  a  matter  of  surprise  if  its  predictions  went  astray.  But 
though  a  succession  of  Apocalyptic  efforts  to  sketch  out  the 
future  triumph  of '  God's  kingdom '  over  the  world-empires 
signally  failed  in  time,  in  place,  in  circumstance,  it  more 
signally  came  true  in  the  barbarian  overthrow  of  the  Roman 
Empire,  and  the  establishment  of  modern  Christendom. 

Substantially  the  same  view  is  taken  by  Archdeacon  Farrar. 
He  censures  Luther's  remark  that  '  for  many  reasons  he  re 
garded  the  book  as  neither  Apostolic  nor  prophetic.'  The 
Archdeacon  holds  it  to  be  both,  and  considers  that  Luther's 
unwarrantable  judgment  proceeded  from  a  deficient  acquaint 
ance  with  the  necessary  characteristics  of  the  Apocalyptic 


250  THE   JOHANNINE    BOOKS.  [XIV. 

style.  The  Apocalyptic  method  differed  from  the  prophetic, 
and  appears  to  stand  upon  a  lower  level  of  predictive  insight. 
But  the  prophecies  of  this  book  have  '  springing  and  germinant 
developments.'  Nero  did  not,  as  was  popularly  supposed, 
take  refuge  among  the  Parthians,  and  was  not  restored  by 
their  means ;  but  the  prophecy  has  received  an  adequate 
fulfilment  in  the  appearance  of  successive  Antichrists  with 
Neronian  characteristics,  Domitian,  Decius,  Diocletian,  and 
many  a  subsequent  persecutor  of  the  saints  of  God. 

It  is  not  the  business  of  this  course  of  lectures  to  discuss 
the  proper  method  of  interpreting  prophecy  ;  for  the  purposes 
of  my  argument  it  is  enough  to  know  what  was  the  method  of 
interpretation  which  prevailed  at  the  time  the  Apocalypse 
was  published.  Now  I  feel  myself  safe  in  saying  that  the 
view  is  quite  modern  which  regards  prophecy  as  a  kind  of 
sacred  song  of  which  the  melody  only  need  be  attended  to, 
the  words  to  which  the  air  is  set  being  quite  unimportant. 
The  ideas  of  the  Jewish  mind  had  been  formed  by  the  Mosaic 
direction  (Deut.  xviii.  22) :  'When  a  prophet  speaketh  in  the 
name  of  the  Lord,  if  the  thing  follow  not,  nor  come  to  pass, 
that  is  the  thing  which  the  Lord  hath  not  spoken,  but  the 
prophet  hath  spoken  it  presumptuously.'  Even  if  this  rule 
had  not  the  sanction  of  Revelation,  it  expresses  the  view  of 
the  matter  which  uninstructed  people  are  apt  to  take.  It  may 
be  true  that  '  mere  soothsaying  is  not  the  intention  of  pro 
phecy  ;'  but  still  they  will  think  that  if  what  the  prophet  says 
is  not  sooth  he  is  no  real  prophet.  And  it  is  difficult  to  put 
them  off  with  evasions.  A  fortune-teller  accused  of  obtaining 
money  on  false  pretences  would  plead  in  vain  that  though  the 
actual  good  things  she  had  promised  were  not  fulfilled,  her 
customers  would  find  her  predictions  true,  in  the  sense  that  if 
they  had  faith  and  patience  something  good  would  somehow, 
at  some  time  or  other,  turn  up.  I  remember  what  success 
Dr.  Gumming  had  as  an  interpreter  of  Apocalyptic  prophecy ; 
how  eagerly  new  books  of  his  were  welcomed,  and  by  what 
thousands  they  were  sold.  But  he  did  what  St.  John  is  said 
to  have  done,  namely,  venture  on  predictions,  the  truth  of 
which  the  next  following  three  or  four  years  would  test. 
Dr.  Gumming  was  surely  entitled  to  all  the  allowances  for 


XIV.]        IMPERFECT   SUCCESS  OF   MODERN  SOLUTIONS.  251 

want  of  accuracy  in  his  forecasts  that  can  be  demanded  for 
the  author  on  whom  he  commented  ;  yet,  when  the  things 
which  he  foretold  did  not  come  to  pass,  his  credit  fell  and 
his  books  disappeared.  And  I  see  no  reason  to  think  that 
Christians  in  the  first  century  were  more  indulgent  critics 
<of  Apocalyptic  predictions.  And  so  I  still  feel  that  the 
success  obtained  by  the  Book  of  the  Revelation  of  St.  John 
throws  a  great  difficulty  in  the  way  of  our  receiving  the 
modern  explanation  of  its  design.  If  the  book,  considered 
as  a  prophecy,  failed  as  completely  as  Dr.  Cumming's,  why 
did  it  not  fall  into  the  same  oblivion  as  Dr.  Cumming's 
books  ? 

When  I  lay  down  one  of  those  modern  essays  which  claim 
to  give  a  key  to  the  meaning  of  the  book,  on  the  ground  of  a 
plausible  explanation  of  three  or  four  selected  texts,  and  then 
take  up  the  book  itself,  I  find  such  a  want  of  correspondence 
that  I  can  only  compare  the  case  to  a  claim  to  have  solved 
a  double  acrostic,  advanced  on  the  score  of  a  fair  guess  at 
two  or  three  of  the  *  lights,'  without  any  attempt  being  made 
to  elucidate  the  rest.  If  the  book  was  intended  to  assure  the 
minds  of  Christians  by  informing  them  of  the  result  of  the 
siege  of  Jerusalem,  or  of  the  political  movements  of  their 
own  time,  that  idea  is  strangely  cast  into  the  background. 
It  is  only  the  opening  chapters  which  appear  to  speak  of 
then  present  events,  and  these  are  occupied  not  with  tem 
poral  matters  in  Judea,  but  with  the  spiritual  condition  of 
the  Churches  of  Asia  Minor.  The  theme  of  the  whole  book 
is  our  Lord's  second  coming  ;  it  is  only  by  laborious  search 
that  a  verse  here  and  there  can  be  found,  of  which  a  political 
explanation  can  be  offered.  In  order  to  accept  the  most 
successful  of  the  explanations,  a  good  deal  of  charitable 
allowance  for  vagueness  must  be  made.  If  we  are  to  con 
fine  interpreters  to  the  date  they  themselves  fix,  the  reign  of 
Galba  (and  a  later  date  involves  the  abandonment  of  the  key- 
text,  that  about  the  seven  kings),  at  that  time  the  blockade  of 
Jerusalem  had  not  been  formed  ;  and  so  the  description  (xi.  2) 
of  the  capture  of  the  city,  and  of  the  treading  down  of  the 
outer  court  of  the  Temple  by  the  Gentiles,  must  be  owned  to 
have  been  suggested  by  nothing  which  had  then  actually 


252  THE   JOHANNINE    BOOKS.  [XIV. 

occurred.  It  is  idle  to  suppose,  as  some  have  done,  that 
xvii.  1 6  refers  to  the  burning  of  the  Capitol,  for  that  only 
took  place  in  the  subsequent  contests  between  the  parties  of 
Vitellius  and  Vespasian  :  idle  also  to  find  references  in  the 
book  to  the  assumption  by  Vespasian  of  miraculous  power  at 
Alexandria,  or  to  his  forbidding  corn  ships  to  sail  to  Rome  : 
still  more  idle  to  find  references  to  the  supposed  flight  of 
Nero  to  Parthia.  Take  the  book  anywhere,  and  ask  the  in 
terpreters  to  condescend  to  details,  and  point  out  how  they 
are  to  be  explained  as  referring  to  events  in  the  reign  of 
Galba,  and  they  are  at  once  at  a  loss.  I  have  already  re 
ferred  to  the  discordance  between  interpreters  of  this  school 
as  to  who  is  intended  by  the  false  prophet.  Still  less  can 
they  explain  what  is  told  about  him.  He  works  miracles  ; 
he  brings  fire  down  from  heaven  ;  he  gives  life  to  the  image 
of  the  beast  and  makes  it  speak  ;  he  causes  those  that  refuse 
to  worship  the  beast's  image  to  be  killed  ;  he  causes  all  to 
receive  the  mark  of  the  beast  in  their  right  hand  or  in  their 
forehead  ;  he  permits  no  man  to  buy  or  sell  who  has  not  this 
mark.*  Who  is  there  at  the  date  in  question  who  can  be 
described  as  having  done,  or  as  being  thought  likely  to  do, 
any  of  these  things  ?  Renan  explains  the  prohibition  to  buy 
or  sell  as  referring  to  the  use  of  the  imperial  effigy  on  coins,, 
which  a  strict  Jew  would  think  it  idolatrous  to  use.  Our 
Lord's  question,  '  Whose  is  this  image  and  superscription  ? ' 
may  assure  us  that  before  the  reign  of  Nero  Jews  had  been 
asked  to  use  such  coins,  and  had  made  no  scruple.  Then 
again,  who  are  the  two  witnesses  (ch.  xi.)  from  whose  mouth 
fire  proceeds  to  destroy  their  enemies,  who  have  power  to 
withhold  rain  and  to  smite  the  earth  with  other  plagues,  who 
are  finally  to  be  slain,  and  whose  bodies  are  to  lie  three  days 
and  a-half  in  the  streets  of  Jerusalem  ?  I  think  that  interpre 
ters  ought  to  be  modest  in  their  belief  that  they  have  got  the 
right  interpretation  of  the  second  verse  of  this  chapter  when 

*  Neither  Farrar's  nor  Kenan's  explanation  of  this  is  so  natural  as  that  we 
have  here  a  plain  prediction  of  'boycotting;'  and  sure  enough  7ra/>/WAAos 
makes  666.  But  seriously,  exclusion  from  ordinary  traffic  was  a  common 
result  of  the  calumnies  circulated  against  Christians  (see  the  letter  of  the 
Churches  of  Vienne  and  Lyons,  Euseb.  v.  I,  a  document  which  quotes  the 
Apocalypse  as  Scripture). 


XIV.]  THE    SOLUTION — NERO    CAESAR.  253 

they  must  own  that  their  method  will  not  carry  them  a  single 
verse  further.  On  the  whole,  it  seems  to  me  that  Dr.  Gum 
ming  could  find  quite  as  many  coincidences  to  justify  his 
methods  of  interpretation  as  those  on  which  the  more  recent 
school  relies. 

But  it  has  been  supposed  that  a  demonstration  of  the 
correctness  of  the  latter  methods  is  afforded  by  the  fact  that 
the  numerical  value  of  the  letters  of  Nero  Caesar  is  666,  and 
that  this  is  so  unquestionably  the  right  solution  of  the  number 
of  the  beast,  that  we  may  regard  Irenaeus's  ignorance  of  it  as 
a  proof  that  he  knew  nothing  about  the  matter.  It  seems  to 
me,  on  the  contrary,  that  a  man  must  know  very  little  of  the 
history  of  the  interpretations  of  this  number  if  he  can  flatter 
himself  that  because  he  has  found  a  word  the  numerical  value 
of  whose  letters  makes  the  required  sum  he  is  sure  of  having 
the  true  solution.  Pages  might  be  filled  with  a  list  of  persons 
whose  names  have  been  proposed  as  solutions  of  the  pro 
blem.  Among  the  persons  supposed  to  be  indicated  are  the 
emperors  Caligula,  Titus,  Trajan,  and  Julian  the  Apostate, 
Genseric  the  Vandal,  Popes  Benedict  IX.  and  Paul  V.,  Maho 
met,  Martin  Luther,  John  Calvin,  Beza,  Archbishop  Laud,  and 
Napoleon  Bonaparte.  There  are  three  rules  by  the  help  of 
which  I  believe  an  ingenious  man  could  find  the  required  sum 
in  any  given  name.*  First,  if  the  proper  name  by  itself  will 
not  yield  it,  add  a  title  ;  secondly,  if  the  sum  cannot  be  found 
in  Greek,  try  Hebrew,  or  even  Latin  ;  thirdly,  do  not  be  too 
particular  about  the  spelling.  The  use  of  a  language  different 


*  I  remember  that  I  once  sent  to  Bishop  Fitz  Gerald  a  proof  that  666 
was  the  sum  of  the  letters  of  the  name  of  some  opponent  at  the  time,  but 
was  rash  enough  to  add  that  I  believed  that  no  retaliation  could  be  made 
either  on  his  name  or  mine.  In  reply  he  presented  me  with  the  solution 
•jinbto  ">r>  5  but  he  added  the  Horatian  caution  : — 

Tu  ne  quaesieris,  quern  mihi  quern  tibi 
Finem  Di  dederint,  nee  Babylonios 
Tentaris  numeros. 

Young  computers  must  be  warned  against  an  error  into  which  some 
have  fallen,  viz.  that  of  confounding  the  '  Episemon,'  which  denotes  six  in 
the  Greek  arithmetical  notation,  either  with  the  final  sigma,  or  with  the 
comparatively  modern  abbreviation  for  err,  which  printers  now  use  also  for 
the  Episemon,  thereby  so  misleading  simple  readers,  that  I  have  found  in 


2  $4  THE   JOHANNINE    BOOKS.  [XIV. 

from  that  to  which  the  name  properly  belongs  allows  a  good 
deal  of  latitude  in  the  transliteration.  For  example,  if  Nero 
will  not  do,  try  Caesar  Nero.  If  this  will  not  succeed  in 
Greek,  try  Hebrew  ;  and  in  writing  Kaisar  in  Hebrew  be  sure 
to  leave  out  the  Jod,  which  would  make  the  sum  too  much  by 
ten.  We  cannot  infer  much  from  the  fact  that  a  key  fits  the 
lock  if  it  is  a  lock  in  which  almost  any  key  will  turn.  Irenaeus, 
I  think,  drew  a  very  sensible  inference  from  the  multiplicity 
of  solutions  which  he  was  himself  able  to  offer.  He  says  (v. 
30) : — '  It  is  safer  therefore  and  less  hazardous  to  await  the 
event  of  the  prophecy  than  to  try  to  guess  or  divine  the  name, 
since  haply  the  same  number  may  be  found  to  suit  many 
names.  For  if  the  names  which  are  found  to  contain  the 
same  number  prove  to  be  many,  which  of  them  will  be  borne 
by  the  coming  one  will  remain  a  matter  of  inquiry.' 

But  it  may  be  urged,  that  though  we  could  not  build  much 
on  the  fact  that  the  letters  of  Nero  Caesar  make  666,  yet  the 
correctness  of  this  solution  is  assured  by  its  also  giving  the 
explanation  of  the  number  616.  But  not  to  say  that  it  shares 
this  advantage  with  other  solutions  containing  a  name  ending 
in  <ov,  let  us  consider  what  is  assumed  when  we  lay  stress  on 
the  fact  that  a  single  name  gives  the  explanation  of  two 
different  numbers.  It  is  assumed  that  the  answer  to  the 
riddle  must  have  been  better  known  than  the  riddle  itself. 
There  must  have  been  a  wide  knowledge  that  Nero  Caesar 
was  intended,  and  that  the  calculation  was  to  be  made  in 
Hebrew  letters,  whereupon  calculators  who  spelt  the  name 
differently  adapted  the  number  in  their  copies  to  the  sum 
which  they  respectively  brought  out.  But  if  there  had  been 

a  scientific  article  the  information  that  the  name  of  the  numerical  sign  is 
Stau  !  It  need  hardly  be  said  that  no  light  is  cast  on  the  number  666  by 
observing  how  it  looks  when  expressed  in  modern  cursive  characters.  In 
extant  uncial  MSS.  the  number  is  written  in  words  at  length,  and  Irenseus 
appears  to  have  so  read  it  in  his  own  MS.,  though  he  conjectures  that  the 
various  reading  616  originated  in  MSS.  where  the  number  was  written  in  let 
ters.  His  words  are  (v.  30), '  Hoc  autem  arbitror  scriptorum  peccatum  fuisse, 
ut  solet  fieri,  quoniam  et  per  literas  numeri  ponuntur,  facile  literam  Grae- 
cam  quae  sexaginta  emmtiat  numerum,  in  iota  Graecorum  literam  expansam.' 
(See  Heumann  in  Biblioth.  Brem.,  i.  p.  869  ;  Godet,  BibL  Studies,  N.  T., 
p.  353,  Lyttleton's  Transl.  ;  Farrar,  Early  Days  of  Christianity,  Bk.  iv.> 
c.  xxviii.  s.  5). 


xiv.]  VISCHER'S  THEORY.  255 

such  widespread  knowledge  of  the  solution  as  is  thus  assumed, 
it  is  incredible  that  it  should  have  been  so  completely  lost 
when  Irenaeus  tried  to  learn  what  was  known  of  the  matter  by 
the  disciples  of  John,  and  was  quite  sure  that  the  calculation 
was  to  be  made  by  Greek  letters.  I  think,  therefore,  that 
no  interpreter  at  the  present  day  is  justified  in  feeling  the 
assurance,  professed  by  some,  that  his  solution  is  the  only 
right  one. 

Although  I  find  myself  unable  to  believe  that  Irenaeus 
could  be  entirely  in  error  as  to  the  whole  object  and  drift  of 
the  Apocalypse,  I  do  not  see  equal  difficulty  in  the  supposition 
that  he  might  have  been  mistaken  as  to  the  date.  I  believe 
that  it  is  an  earlier  book  than  the  Gospel,  both  on  account  of 
the  character  of  the  Greek  and  for  other  reasons,  on  which 
see  Westcott's  Introduction  (Speaker's  Commentary,  p.  Ixxxvi). 
Nor  do  I  think  the  time  soon  after  the  death  of  Nero  an  im 
probable  date.  I  am  well  disposed  to  adopt  Kenan's  conjec 
ture  that  St.  John  had  been  in  Rome  and  witnessed  the 
Neronian  persecution,  and  that  his  book  was  written  while 
the  impression  made  by  those  scenes  of  blood  was  still  fresh 
(Rev.  xvii.  6  ;  xviii.  20,  24;  vi.  9,  10). 


In  what  precedes,  I  had  more  than  once  (pp.  29,  252)  had 
occasion  to  point  out  that  inferences  drawn  from  verses  here 
and  there  in  the  Apocalypse  fail  to  commend  themselves, 
when  the  whole  book  is  taken  into  consideration.  Since  these 
lectures  were  published,  Vischer,  a  German  theological  stu 
dent,  has  found  a  way  of  meeting  these  difficulties,  which  has 
been  enthusiastically  adopted  by  his  teacher  Harnack.  Thus, 
it  is  hoped  to  reconcile  the  supposed  narrow  Judaism  of  part 
of  the  work  with  the  universalism  of  chap.  vii.,and  the  Neronic 
date  deduced  from  chaps,  xi.,  xii.,  xiii.,  xvii.,  with  the  tradition 
which  places  the  book  in  the  reign  of  Domitian.  The  theory, 
in  short,  is  that  the  book  is  composite,  being  in  the  main  a 
purely  Jewish  Apocalypse  written  about  the  year  69,  but 
edited,  some  quarter  of  a  century  later,  by  a  Christian  who 
has  prefixed  an  introduction,  added  a  conclusion,  and  made 
occasional  interpolations.  If  we  desire  to  know  what  was 


256  THE   JOHANNINE    BOOKS.  [XIV. 

the   original  Apocalypse,  we  are  taught  that  we  have  nothing 
to  do  but  strike  out  of   our  present   text   every   phrase    or 
sentence  that  betrays    a   knowledge    of    Christianity.     It  is 
not  more  difficult  than  that.      In  some  cases  the  excision  of  a 
single  phrase  will  suffice.     Thus,  for  example,  '  The  kingdom 
of  the  world  is  become  the  kingdom  of  our  Lord,  and  of  His 
Christ ;'  'Ye  saints,  and  ye  apostles,  and  ye  prophets  ;'  'Which 
keep   the    Commandments    of   God,    and  hold  the   testimony 
of  Jesus ;'  '  The  song  of  Moses,  and  the  song  of  the  Lamb? 
In  all  these  cases  we  have  only  to  strike  out  the  words  in 
italics.    The  rule,  indeed,  that  the  words  'the  Lamb'  must  be 
struck  out  wherever    they  occur  embarrasses  us   a  little  on 
their  first  introduction  (v.  6),  where  the  seals  of  the  book 
are  described  as  opened  by  'a  Lamb  standing  as  though  it 
had  been  slain.'     When  these  words  are  struck  out,   who  is 
left  to  open  the  seals  ?     Vischer  suggests,  that  v.  5  would  lead 
us  to  think  that  what  had  stood  in  the  original  was  a  lion, 
not  a  lamb.     In  other  cases  whole  verses  have  to  be  left  out; 
for   Christian   verses   will   intrude   themselves   in   the   most 
improper  places.      For  instance,   the  kernel    of  the  whole 
composition  is  said  to  be  chaps,  xi.  and  xii.,  in  which  the  purely 
Jewish  character  of  the  book  is  most  unmistakeably  mani 
fested.     Yet  in  chap.  xi.  there  is  a  verse  (v.  8)  which  must 
be  cancelled  as  mentioning  the  city  'where  our  Lord  was 
crucified;'  and  in  chap,  xii.,  another  (v.  12),  which  Vischer 
likewise  finds  it  necessary  to  strike  out.     I  will  not  delay  to 
speak  of  some  longer  passages  which  must  be  cancelled,  such 
as  v.  9-14,  vii.  9-17,  xiv.  1-5,  and  above  all,  the  introduction 
consisting  of  three  chapters.     It  is  to  be  noted  that,  when 
these  are  removed,  a  fearful  wound  is  made ;  for  the  original 
Jewish  Apocalypse,  as  Vischer  prints  it,  begins  :  '  After  these 
things  I  saw,  and  behold  a  door  opened  in  heaven ;  and  the 
first  voice  which  I  heard,  a  voice   as  of  a  trumpet  speak 
ing  with  me.'     It  is  clear  that  the  original  Apocalypse  must 
have  contained,  if  not  our  present  introduction,  some  other 
introduction,  and  one  agreeing  with  the  present  in  including 
a  verse  like  i.  10,  in  which  mention  is  made  of  a  voice  like 
that  of  a  trumpet.     Vischer   conjectures   that   the  original 
introduction  named  as  the  seer  one  of  the  old  prophets. 


xiv.]  VISCHER'S  THEORY.  257 

It  is  difficult  to  encounter  an  antagonist  who  comes  arrayed 
in  impenetrable  armour,  or  it  would  be  more  correct  to  say, 
one  who  runs  away  from  every  blow.  It  is  hard  to  refute  a 
theorist  who  feels  himself  at  liberty  to  reject  as  an  interpo 
lation  every  passage  inconsistent  with  his  theory.  Mr.  Chase 
has  shown*  that  it  can  be  demonstrated  in  the  same  way  that 
the  First  Epistle  to  the  Thessalonians  is  a  purely  Jewish  docu 
ment  with  a  few  Christian  interpolations.  I  dare  say  it  would 
be  possible  to  set  the  epistles  of  Phalaris  on  their  legs  again, 
by  striking  out  all  the  passages  in  which  Bentley  pointed  out 
notes  of  modernness  ;  and  it  would  be  worth  the  while  of  a 
Roman  Catholic  advocate  to  try  whether,  by  judicious  readi 
ness  to  surrender  every  assailed  position,  he  might  not  be  able 
to  find  in  the  Decretal  Epistles,  after  a  few  excisions  had  been 
made,  a  genuine  collection  of  early  Papal  letters.  True,  he 
would  have  to  face  the  objection  that  the  Decretal  Epistles 
exhibit  complete  unity  of  style  ;  but  Vischer  has  to  encounter 
this  same  objection,  for  the  very  peculiar  character  of  the 
Greek  of  the  first  three  chapters  pervades  the  entire  book. 
So  he  modifies  his  hypothesis  by  the  supposition  that  the 
original  Apocalypse  was  in  Aramaic,  and  that  it  is  because 
the  editor  was  translator  as  well,  that  we  find  his  style  im 
pressed  on  the  whole  book.  But  the  introduction  is  connected 
with  what  follows,  not  only  by  unity  of  style,  but  by  several 
cross-references.  Thus,  compare  ii.  7,  xxii.  2;  ii.  n,  xx.  6, 
xxi.  8;  ii.  16,  xix.  21  ;  ii.  17,  xix.  12,  xxii.  4;  ii.  27,  xix.  15, 
xii.  5;  iii.  5,  xx.  15;  iii.  12,  xxi.  10,  xxii.  4;  iii.  21,  v.  6, 
xx.  4.  Sabatier,f  who  points  out  these  and  other  coincidences, 
though  he  has  persuaded  himself  of  the  use  of  a  Jewish  docu 
ment  in  the  later  chapters,  finds  it  impossible  to  discover  any 
breach  of  continuity  in  the  earlier  chapters  of  the  book. 

Vischer  urges  as  an  argument  in  favour  of  his  hypothesis 
that  the  number  of  interpolations  he  is  obliged  to  assume  is 
extremely  small ;  but  this  fact  really  tells  the  other  way.  For 
the  writer  of  the  first  three  chapters  must  surely  have  been  a 
man  of  considerable  fertility  of  imagination  ;  and  though  we 

*  Expositor,  ill.  v.  179. 

t  Les  origines  litteraires  et  la  composition  de  V  Apocalypse  de  Saint  Jean, 
extrait  de  la  Revue  de  theologie  et  de  philosophic. 


258  THE   JOHANNINE    BOOKS.  [XIV. 

may  admit  it  to  be  possible  that  in  writing  a  book  of  prophetic 
visions  he  may  have  used  ideas  suggested  to  him  by  some  pre 
viously  published  apocalypse,  we  cannot  think  it  likely  that 
he  would  have  just  slavishly  copied  that  earlier  book,  merely 
throwing  in  a  Christian  phrase  here  and  there.  If  it  is  said 
that,  being  himself  a  Jew  by  birth  and  training,  and  in  habits 
of  thought,  he  was  quite  satisfied  with  an  apocalypse  as  Jewish 
as  that  which  he  has  adapted,  where  is  the  impossibility  of  his 
having  written  it  ?  The  difficulty  is  increased  when  we  find 
that  the  Christian  editor  is  not  anonymous.  He  claims  to 
be,  if  not  the  Apostle  John,  as  the  Christian  Church,  from 
the  time  of  Justin  Martyr  downwards  has  supposed,  at  least 
a  personage  well  known  to  the  Churches  of  Asia,  to  whom  his 
letter  was  addressed.  He  tells  them  of  visions  which  he  had 
seen,  and  which  our  Lord  in  person  had  charged  him  to 
write  in  a  book  and  send  it  to  these  Churches.  The  pronoun 
'  I '  runs  through  the  book,  which  closes  by  repeating  the 
assertion  that  it  was  John  himself  who  had  seen  these  things 
and  heard  them.  Previous  critics  who  recognized  in  the 
book  no  divine  revelation  could  at  least  think  respectfully  of 
the  writer  whose  imagination  had  been  fired  in  brooding  over 
the  great  events  of  his  time,  and  who  sincerely  believed  him 
self  to  be  commissioned  to  deliver  a  prophetic  message.  But 
now  we  are  asked  to  think  of  him  as  a  cold-blooded  literary 
forger,  who  has  got  hold  of  the  work  of  an  earlier  writer,  and 
making  some  trivial  changes  in  it,  passes  it  off  as  his  own. 
And  what  a  terrible  risk  he  ran  !  A  Christian  who  found  a 
Jewish  apocalypse  ascribed  to  Enoch,  or  Ezra,  or  Baruch,  if 
he  preserved  the  title,  could,  without  much  danger  of  ex 
posure,  add  a  few  touches  to  improve  the  doctrinal  teaching 
of  the  book.  If  the  improved  edition  fell  into  the  hands  of 
one  acquainted  with  the  older  form,  it  might  not  be  difficult 
to  persuade  him  that  the  fuller  form  was  the  genuine  one. 
But  it  would  be  a  very  different  thing  if  a  reader  detected 
that  the  revelations  which  John  claimed  to  have  seen  and 
heard  himself  were  nothing  but  transcripts  from  a  work 
ascribed  to  one  of  the  elder  prophets.  What  should  we 
think  of  anyone  now  who  should  copy  verbatim  the  6th  of 
Isaiah,  and  publish  it  as  an  account  of  something  that  had 


xiv.]  VISCHER'S  THEORY.  259 

happened  to  himself?  Or,  since  such  conduct  is  scarce  con 
ceivable,  what  would  be  thought  of  the  author  of  a  book  of 
travels,  if  it  was  discovered  that  whole  pages  had  been  copied 
from  an  earlier  book  of  travels,  and  if  all  the  adventures 
which  the  elder  traveller  had  passed  through  were  told  as 
having  happened  to  the  younger.  It  would  surely  be  said 
that  he  was  an  impostor  who  had  never  been  in  the  countries 
which  he  described.  Literary  morality  may  not  have  been  as 
strict  in  the  first  century  as  in  the  nineteenth  ;  but  it  never 
could  have  been  lax  enough  to  tolerate  plagiarism  of  the 
kind  ascribed  to  St.  John. 

Sabatier's  theory  in  some  measure  escapes  this  objection. 
He  points  out  that  the  plan  of  the  book  is  a  scheme  of  seven 
seals,  seven  trumpets,  seven  vials  ;  and  he  considers  that,  as 
the  opening  of  the  seventh  seal  introduces  the  seven  trumpets, 
so  ought  the  sounding  of  the  seventh  trumpet  to  introduce 
the  seven  vials.  But,  in  point  of  fact,  between  the  sounding  of 
the  seventh  trumpet  (xi.  15)  and  the  pouring  out  of  the  vials 
(ch.  xvi.)  there  is  a  great  interruption.  We  have  interpolated 
(ch.  xii.)  the  vision  of  the  birth  of  the  Messiah,  the  vision  of 
the  beast  and  the  false  prophet  (ch.  xiii.),  and  the  judgment  of 
the  great  whore  (xvii.,  xviii.).  This  intrusive  matter  Sabatier 
regards  as  derived  from  an  earlier  non-Christian  source ;  and 
he  considers  that  the  author  has  made  sufficient  acknowledg 
ment  of  obligation  in  his  account  (x.  8)  of  a  little  book 
given  him  by  an  angel.  Anyone  who  might  chance  to  have 
been  previously  acquainted  with  the  interpolated  section 
would  perceive  that  John  did  not  give  it  as  part  of  his  own 
visions,  but  as  the  contents  of  the  little  book  which  he  then 
received. 

Now,  in  the  first  place,  without  laying  any  stress  on  the 
special  character  of  the  Apocalypse,  it  would  be  thought 
strange  criticism  even  of  a  book  of  the  present  day  if  it  were 
inferred  that,  because  an  author  had  not  carried  out  his  plans 
with  perfect  regularity,  therefore  he  must  be  stealing  his 
materials  from  some  independent  source.  Why,  the  most 
eminent  writers  of  fiction  have  complained  that  in  the  act  of 
composition  they  lose  command  of  their  pen,  which  seems  as 
if  it  had  a  will  of  its  own  :  characters  meant  to  be  subordinate 

S2 


260  THE   JOHANNINE    BOOKS.  [XIV. 

assume  a  place  not  intended  for  them  ;  and  what  had  been  de 
signed  to  be  a  mere  episode  swells  into  a  principal  part  of  the 
story.  But  it  is  more  important  to  observe  that  the  questioned 
chapters  do  not,  as  Vischer  and  Sabatier  suppose,  differ  from 
the  rest  of  the  book,  or  betray  a  distinctly  Judaic  non-Christian 
character.  Thus,  for  instance,  we  are  told  that  the  Messiah, 
bom  in  the  izth  chapter,  is  not  Jesus  Christ.  I  will  not  dwell 
on  one  supposed  proof,  which  can  be  easily  answered,  viz. — 
that  the  Apocalypse  deals  with  the  future,  and  therefore 
that  we  cannot  have  here  a  Christian  reference  to  a  past 
event.  But  it  is  said  that  there  is  not  a  word  about  the 
Crucifixion  or  the  historic  life  of  Jesus.  The  Messiah 
is  bom,  and  then  at  once  caught  up  to  the  throne  of 
God.  But  it  must  be  remembered  that  the  chapter  in  the 
Apocalypse  is  symbolical :  the  scene  is  laid  in  heaven ;  so 
that  we  could  not  expect  to  read  of  the  Crucifixion  or  any 
other  event  of  our  Lord's  earthly  life.  But  the  whole  concep 
tion  of  the  1 2th  chapter  is  essentially  Christian.  It  tells  of  a 
Messiah  whose  triumph  is  delayed,  and  whose  course  begins  in 
persecution.  This  chapter  occurs  in  that  stage  of  the  visions 
when  the  seventh  trumpet  has  sounded,  when,  as  we  are  told 
(x.  7),  '  the  mystery  of  God  is  finished,  according  to  the  good 
tidings  which  He  declared  to  His  servants  the  prophets.'  The 
sounding  of  the  trumpet  is  received  with  acclamation  in 
heaven  :  '  The  kingdom  of  this  world  is  become  the  kingdom 
of  our  Lord'  (xi.  15).  Then  comes  the  appearance  of  him 
who  is  '  to  rule  all  nations  with  a  rod  of  iron '  (xii.  5).  Surely 
if  this  had  been  a  purely  Jewish  Apocalypse  we  should  read 
of  the  Messiah  coming  in  victory  and  triumph.  Instead  of 
that,  he  is  only  born  as  a  child  ;  he  is  persecuted  with  such 
violence  that  the  woman  who  has  borne  him  must  flee  into 
the  wilderness  ;  and,  in  order  to  preserve  his  own  life,  he 
must  be  caught  up  to  the  throne  of  God.  It  is  not  until 
chap.  xix.  1 1  that  we  read  of  the  coming  of  the  Messiah  from 
heaven;  the  whole  description  having  many  striking  resem 
blances  with  the  Christian  expectation,  as  stated  2  Thess.  i.y,  8, 
that  '  the  Lord  Jesus  shall  be  revealed  from  heaven  with  His 
mighty  angels,  in  flaming  fire,  taking  vengeance  on  them  that 
know  not  God.'  It  seems  to  me  certain  that  no  Jew,  ignorant 


xiv.]  VISCHER'S  THEORY.  261 

of  our  Lord's  history,  would  have  formed  such  an  expectation 
of  the  appearance  of  his  Messiah  as  is  presented  in  chap, 
xii. 

Again,  the  section  on  the  fall  of  Babylon  is  supposed  to 
express  only  the  undying  animosity  of  the  Jew  against  the 
Roman.  There  is  something  more  :  the  animosity  is  against 
the  city  of  Rome.  We  could  understand  a  mere  Jew  being 
full  of  indignation  against  Roman  domination,  as  exercised  in 
his  own  land  or  in  the  provinces  ;  but  in  this  case  it  is  in  the 
city  of  Rome  that  *  is  found  the  blood  of  prophets  and  of  saints' 
(xviii.  24) ;  '  this  woman  is  drunk  with  the  blood  of  the  saints' 
(xvii.  6) :  see  also  xviii.  20.  I  have  allowed  Vischer  to  erase  the 
mention  of  the  blood  of  the  martyrs  of  Jesus  in  xvii.  6  ;  but  it 
seems  to  me  that  the  whole  description  is  unintelligible  if  we 
suppose  anything  else  referred  to  than  the  slaughter  of 
Christians  in  the  Neronic  persecution.  Jews  were  not  perse 
cuted  for  their  religion  by  the  Romans  as  they  had  been  in 
the  time  of  Antiochus  Epiphanes  ;  certainly  we  know  nothing 
of  the  kind  as  happening  in  Rome  itself.  I  think  we  can 
also  trace  the  hand  of  one  who  had  personally  visited  Rome 
in  the  magnificent  description  (ch.  xviii.)  of  the  mercantile 
greatness  of  the  city.  We  naturally  think  of  Rome  as  the 
seat  of  empire  ;  but  I  do  not  think  it  would  have  occurred  to 
one  who  had  not  witnessed  the  throng  of  merchants  and  the 
abundance  of  all  manner  of  precious  things  which  they  had 
brought  in,  to  give  such  a  description  of  Rome  as  might  seem 
suitable  only  to  a  commercial  city  like  Tyre. 

Lastly,  I  do  not  understand  how  Vischer  and  Sabatier  can 
reconcile  with  their  system  their  adherence  to  what  has  now 
become  the  traditional  rationalistic  explanation  of  xi.  2,  viz.  that 
we  have  here  a  false  prophecy  that  in  the  siege  of  Jerusalem  the 
enemy  should  not  succeed  incapturingmore  than  the  outer  court 
of  the  Temple  which  they  were  to  hold  for  forty-two  months. 
How  those  within  were  to  be  provisioned  for  that  time  we  are 
not  told.  But,  according  to  the  theory  of  Vischer  and  Sabatier, 
we  have  in  the  Book  of  the  Revelation  a  work  published  by  a 
Christian  who  lived  long  enough  after  the  siege  of  Jerusalem 
to  know  that  the  capture  of  the  city, Temple  and  all,  had  been 
complete.  If  he  found  the  verse  xi.  2,  as  is  alleged,  in  a  previous 


262  THE   JOHANNINE    BOOKS.  [XV. 

document  he  could  not  possibly  have  understood  it,  as  do  our 
modern  interpreters,  else  he  would  have  known  the  book  to  be 
a  false  prophecy,  not  worth  the  trouble  he  bestowed  on  it.  He 
must,  therefore,  have  interpreted  the  passage  symbolically, 
and  have  regarded  the  temple  that  was  measured  as  being  not 
the  material  Temple  in  Jerusalem,  but  its  prototype  in  heaven. 
And  so  likewise  with  the  first  readers  of  the  book.  If  there 
had  been,  as  Vischer  imagines,  a  previous  Apocalypse  in  Ara 
maic  it  must  have  been  unknown  to  the  first  readers  of  the 
present  book,  otherwise  our  author  would  not  have  ventured  to 
plagiarize  from  it  so  largely.  These  readers,  every  one  of 
whom  well  knew  that  the  Temple  was  utterly  destroyed,  could 
not  have  put  the  modern  interpretation  on  this  passage.  What 
then  can  be  more  paradoxical  than  to  hold  that  the  only 
legitimate  interpretation  of  a  book  is  one  that  was  not 
dreamed  of,  either  by  him  who  first  published  it,  or  by  its 
first  readers  ? 


xv. 
PART   IV. 

THE  FOURTH  GOSPEL  AND  THE  QUARTODECIMANS. 

I  COME  now  to  state  another  objection  to  the  antiquity  of 
the  fourth  Gospel,  which  has  been  repeated  in  tones  of  the 
utmost  triumph,  as  if  it  were  unanswerable.  At  least  it  used 
to  be  ;  but  even  the  few  years  that  I  have  been  lecturing  have 
been  long  enough  to  enable  me  to  see  the  dying  out  of  some 
objections  that  once  were  regarded  as  formidable.  This  argu 
ment,  which  I  am  now  about  to  state,  was  not  long  since 
greatly  relied  on  by  the  assailants  of  the  Gospel ;  but  now  I 
think  the  more  candid  and  cautious  are  inclined  to  abandon 
it  as  worthless.  What  the  argument  aims  at  proving  is,  that 
the  Quartodecimans,  who  in  the  second  century  predominated 
in  the  Churches  of  Asia  Minor,  did  not  recognize  the  authority 
of  the  fourth  Gospel,  or  own  John  as  its  author.  Now  since 
according  to  all  the  evidence,  Asia  Minor  was  the  birthplace 
of  that  Gospel,  and  the  place  where  its  authority  was  earliest 


XV.]  THE   QUARTODECIMANS.  263 

acknowledged,  the  fact  of  its  actual  reception  there  is  so  well 
established,  that  it  is  natural  to  think  there  must  be  some 
flaw  in  an  argument  which  undertakes  to  show  by  an  indirect 
process  that  the  Asiatic  Churches  could  not  have  accepted  it. 
The  objection  is  founded  on  a  real  difficulty  in  an  apparent 
discrepancy  between  the  fourth  and  the  Synoptic  Evangelists. 
In  reading  the  first  three  Evangelists  we  feel  no  doubt  that 
our  Lord  celebrated  the  feast  of  the  passover  on  the  night 
before  He  suffered.  St.  Matthew  tells  us  expressly  (xxvi.  17) 
that  on  the  first  day  of  unleavened  bread  our  Lord  sent  the 
message — '  My  time  is  at  hand,  I  will  keep  the  passover  at 
thy  house  with  My  disciples;'  that  the  disciples  did  as  Jesus 
commanded,  and  made  ready  the  passover,  and  when  the 
even  was  come  Jesus  sat  down  with  the  disciples.  St.  Mark 
(xiv.  12)  adds  that  this  was  'the  day  when  they  sacrificed  the 
passover.'  St.  Luke  closely  agrees  with  St.  Mark,  and  adds 
(xxii.  15)  that  our  Lord  said  :  '  With  desire  I  have  desired  to 
eat  this  passover  with  you  before  I  suffer:  for  I  say  unto  you  I 
will  not  any  more  eat  thereof  until  it  be  fulfilled  in  the  king 
dom  of  God.'  Thus,  according  to  these  three  Evangelists, 
our  Lord  ate  the  passover  on  the  evening  of  the  first  day  of 
unleavened  bread,  and  suffered  the  following  day.  St.  John, 
on  the  other  hand,  tells  us  (xiii.  i)  that  the  supper  at  which 
our  Lord  told  the  disciples  that  one  of  them  should  betray 
Him  was  '  before  the  feast  of  the  passover.'  When  Judas 
leaves  the  room,  the  other  disciples  think  that  Jesus  has 
commissioned  him  to  buy  the  things  that  they  had  need  of 
against  the  feast  (xiii.  29),  implying  that  the  feast  was  still 
future.  Next  day  the  Jews  refuse  to  enter  the  judgment-seat, 
that  they  might  not  be  defiled,  but  might  eat  the  passover 
(xviii.  28).  Thus  the  impression  left  by  John's  narrative  is, 
that  Jesus  did  not  eat  the  passover,  but  that  He  suffered  on 
the  first  day  of  the  feast,  being  Himself  the  true  passover. 
Baur's  theory  is  that  one  great  object  of  St.  John's  Gospel 
was  to  bring  out  this  point,  that  Christ  was  the  true  passover  ; 
and  he  quotes  St.  John's  application  (xix.  36)  as  a  prophecy 
concerning  Christ,  of  the  law  of  the  passover,  '  neither  shall 
ye  break  a  bone  thereof  (Ex.  xii.  46,  Num.  ix.  12).  It  has 
been  doubted  whether  the  quotation  is  not  rather  from  the 


264  THE   JOHANNINE    BOOKS.  [XV. 

Psalms,  from  which  John  quotes  so  many  other  prophecies  of 
Christ :  '  He  keepeth  all  his  bones,  not  one  of  them  is  broken" 
(xxxiv.  20) ;  but  I  am  not  inclined  to  dispute  the  reference  to 
the  passover,  as  to  which  Baur  only  expresses  the  general 
opinion  of  orthodox  interpreters. 

Now,  that  there  is  here  a  real  difficulty  I  freely  acknow 
ledge ;  for  there  seems  a  force  put  on  the  words  of  John,  if 
our  Lord's  Last  Supper  be  made  the  passover  supper,  or  else 
a  force  put  on  the  words  of  the  Synoptic  Evangelists  if  it 
be  not.*  It  probably  requires  only  a  fuller  knowledge  of 
some  of  the  facts  connected  with  the  usages  of  the  time  to 
remove  the  discrepancy.  The  ancient  authorities  (the  Bible, 
Josephus,  and  Philo)  leave  some  points  undetermined  on 
which  we  desire  information,  while  regulations  cited  from  the 
Talmud  are  open  to  the  doubt  whether  they  are  as  ancient  as 
our  Lord's  days.  Without  knowing,  for  example,  what  latitude 
the  usages  of  that  period  permitted  as  to  the  time  of  holding 
the  feast,  we  cannot  tell  whether  to  accept  solutions  which 
assume  that  the  priests  did  not  eat  the  passover  at  the  same 
time  as  our  Lord's  disciples.  Some  have  suggested  that  our 
Lord  may  have  anticipated  the  time  usual  among  the  Jews, 
in  order  to  partake  of  the  feast  with  His  disciples  before 
He  suffered  ;  others  adopt  Chrysostom's  conjecture  that  the 
Jewish  rulers  postponed  their  passover  in  their  occupation 
with  arrangements  for  the  capture  and  trial  of  our  Lord.  It 
has  been  pointed  out  that  what  St.  John  tells  of  the  scruple  of 
the  Jewish  rulers  to  enter  the  Praetorium  does  not  imply  (as 
some  have  inferred)  that  the  Evangelist  meant  his  readers  to 
regard  this  incident  as  having  taken  place  on  the  morning  of 


*  The  view  that  the  Last  Supper  was  the  passover  is  advocated,  among 
recent  writers,  by  Wieseler,  Synopsis,  p.  313  ;  by  M'Clellan,  Commentary, 
p.  473  ;  by  Edersheim,  Life  of  Jesus  the  Messiah,  ii.  p.  479.  See  also 
Dean  Plumptre's  Excursus  in  Ellicott's  Commentary.  The  opposite  view 
is  maintained  by  Sanday,  Fourth  Gospel,  p.  201  ;  and  by  Westcott,  Intro 
duction  to  Gospels,  p.  344  ;  and  in  the  Speaker's  Commentary.  This  latter 
view  was  held  by  Clement  of  Alexandria,  by  Hippolytus,  and  by  early 
Christian  writers  generally.  Several  quotations  will  be  found  in  the  Preface 
to  the  Paschal  Chronicle  (Bonn  edit.,  p.  12),  that  from  Clement  being  par 
ticularly  interesting.  But  as  on  this  point  the  earliest  fathers  had  no  more 
means  of  real  information  than  ourselves,  the  opinion  of  a  father  has  no- 
higher  authority  than  that  of  an  eminent  critic  of  our  own  day. 


XV.]  THE   QUARTODECIMANS.  265 

the  day  on  which  the  passover  was  afterwards  to  be  eaten. 
The  passover  would  not  be  eaten  till  the  evening ;  but  before 
that  time  the  defilement  contracted  by  entering  the  heathen 
house  could  have  been  removed.  Consequently  it  is  urged 
that  what  the  Jewish  rulers  proposed  to  eat  must  have  been 
something  to  be  partaken  of  immediately  :  either  the  pass- 
over  proper,  their  regular  celebration  of  which  at  an  earlier 
hour  that  night  had  been  interrupted,  but  of  which  they 
regarded  themselves  still  in  time  to  partake  in  the  early 
morning  on  their  return  home  from  their  interview  with 
Pilate ;  or  else  the  '  Chagigah,'  a  free-will  offering  made  on 
the  morning  following  the  passover,  but  to  which,  accord 
ing  to  competent  authorities,  the  name  'passover'  might  be 
applied. 

However,  our  present  business  is  not  to  harmonize  the 
Gospels,  or  remove  their  apparent  inconsistencies.  Such  a 
work  belongs  to  a  later  stage  of  the  inquiry ;  and,  as  I  said 
before,  concerns  Christians  alone,  and  is  one  with  which  those 
who  stand  without  have  nothing  to  do.  Critics,  I  think,  over 
rate  their  knowledge  of  the  Jewish  usages  of  the  time,  who 
suppose  themselves  in  a  position  to  assert  that  there  is  a  real 
disagreement  between  St.  John  and  the  other  Evangelists. 
But  what  we  have  now  to  consider  is  whether,  even  supposing 
there  be  such  a  real  disagreement,  this  makes  it  impossible  to 
believe  in  the  early  date  of  St.  John's  Gospel.  Now,  to  my 
mind,  the  conclusion  is  quite  the  reverse — this,  and  other 
seeming  contradictions  between  St.  John  and  the  earlier 
Evangelists,  being,  as  I  think,  inconsistent  with  the  ascription 
of  a  late  date  to  the  Gospel.  For  let  us  suppose  that  the 
fourth  Gospel  was  not  written  until  after  the  other  Gospels 
had  had  time  to  gain  acceptance,  and  to  be  generally  received 
among  Christians  as  the  authentic  account  of  their  Master's 
life ;  and  is  it  conceivable  that  a  forger,  wishing  to  pass  off 
his  performance  as  the  work  of  an  Apostle,  would  have  set 
himself  in  flagrant  opposition  to  the  general  belief  of  Chris 
tians  ?  John  is  quite  silent  about  many  most  important  events 
in  our  Lord's  life  :  in  fact,  as  a  general  rule,  the  things  which 
he  relates  are  the  things  not  told  in  the  former  Gospels  ;  yet 
he  makes  no  mention  of  preceding  writings,  and  does  not 


266  THE   JOHANNINE   BOOKS.  [XV. 

declare  any  intention  of  supplementing  them.  A  forger  would 
either  have  made  a  Gospel  which  he  might  hope  to  pass  off  as 
an  independent  complete  account  of  the  Saviour's  life,  or  else 
he  would  profess  to  take  the  existing  histories  as  his  basis, 
and  to  supply  what  was  wanting  in  them.  And  certainly  the 
forger  of  a  supplemental  history  would  be  cautious  to  dovetail 
his  work  properly  into  the  accepted  story.  He  would  not 
venture,  without  a  word  of  explanation,  to  make  statements 
seemingly  in  direct  contradiction  to  what  the  Church  had 
received  as  the  true  Apostolic  tradition.  It  seems  to  me, 
then,  that  the  phenomena  presented  by  the  fourth  Gospel 
•can  only  be  explained  either  by  the  hypothesis  that  it  was 
published  at  so  early  a  date  that  its  writer  was  not  aware  of 
any  necessity  to  take  notice  of  other  accounts  of  the  Saviour's 
life  ;  or  else  that  it  was  written,  as  the  Church  has  always 
believed  it  was,  by  an  Apostle  whose  own  authority  stood  so 
high  that  it  was  unnecessary  for  him  to  trouble  himself  to 
consider  what  others  had  said  before  him. 

I  believe  that  the  latter  explanation  is  the  true  one.  All 
agree  in  placing  the  publication  of  John's  Gospel  so  late 
that  it  is  incredible  but  that  other  Gospels  had  previously 
been  published,  of  which  the  writer  could  not  be  ignorant. 
No  one  whose  own  knowledge  of  our  Lord's  life  was  second 
hand  would  have  ventured  to  dispense  with  a  careful  study  of 
the  traditions  which  rested  on  the  authority  of  his  immediate 
followers;  but  it  is  quite  conceivable  that  the  person  least 
likely  to  study  what  had  been  said  by  others  would  be  one 
who  was  conscious  that  he  needed  not  to  learn  the  facts  from 
any  other,  but  could  himself  testify  '  what  he  had  heard,  what 
he  had  seen  with  his  eyes,  what  he  had  looked  upon,  and  his 
hands  had  handled,  of  the  Word  of  Life.' 

I  have  now  to  explain  how  this  discrepancy,  real  or  appa 
rent,  between  the  Gospels,  has  been  connected  with  the 
Easter  controversies  of  the  second  century.  There  is  still 
a  good  deal  of  uncertainty  as  to  the  exact  point  at  issue  in 
these  disputes ;  but  this  much  in  general  you  are  aware  of, 
that  the  Churches  of  Asia  Minor,  where  the  Apostle  John, 
according  to  the  most  trustworthy  tradition,  spent  the  last 
years  of  his  life,  celebrated  their  paschal  solemnities  on  the 


XV.]  HISTORY   OF   EARLY   PASCHAL   DISPUTES.  267 

day  of  the  Jewish  Passover,  the  fourteenth  day  of  the  first 
month,*  and  that  they  cited  the  Apostle  John  as  the  author 
of  this  custom.  The  Churches  of  the  West,  and  indeed  of 
the  rest  of  Christendom  generally,  held  their  paschal  feast  on 
the  following  Sunday,  and  continued  their  preliminary  fast 
up  to  that  Sunday,  and  after  their  Quartodeciman  brethren 
had  broken  it  off.  There  can  be  no  doubt  that  the  Western 
paschal  feast  was  intended  to  commemorate  the  Resurrection 
of  our  Lord.  In  the  Christian  Church  the  weekly  Resurrec 
tion  feast  was  instituted  before  the  annual  feast ;  and  it  is 
plain  that  those  who  made  their  paschal  feast  coincide  with 
their  weekly  celebration  of  the  Resurrection  did  so  in  order 
to  celebrate  with  peculiar  joy  that  Lord's  day  which  in  the 
time  of  year  most  nearly  approached  to  the  time  of  His 
rising  from  the  dead. 

But  what  was  the  Eastern  feast  on  the  fourteenth  day  of 
the  month  intended  to  commemorate  ?  The  Tubingen  school 
make  answer,  the  Last  Supper  of  the  Lord.  And  then  their 
argument  proceeds  thus : — The  Asiatics  commemorated  the 
Last  Supper  on  the  fourteenth  day  of  the  month  :  they  there 
fore  adopted  the  reckoning  of  the  Synoptic  Gospels,  accord 
ing  to  which  the  Last  Supper  was  held  on  the  fourteenth, 
and  the  Passion  took  place  on  the  following  day.f  And  since 
the  Churches  of  Asia  cited  John  as  the  author  of  their  cus 
tom,  they  must,  if  they  knew  the  fourth  Gospel,  have  rejected 
its  claims  to  proceed  from  John  the  Apostle,  since  it  appa 
rently  makes  the  fourteenth  the  day  not  of  the  Supper,  but  of 
the  Passion.  The  whole  argument,  you  will  perceive,  rests 
on  the  assumption  that  the  Asiatic  paschal  feast  was  intended 
to  commemorate  the  Last  Supper ;  but  where  is  the  proof  of 
that  assumption  ?  There  is  absolutely  none. 

*  According  to  Exod.  xii.  6,  the  passover  was  to  be  killed  on  the  I4th  day 
*  between  the  evenings.'  Since  the  Jewish  day,  at  least  for  ecclesiastical 
purposes,  began  with  the  evening,  some  have  understood  from  this  that 
the  passover  was  to  be  killed  on  the  beginning  of  the  Jewish  I4th  day,  or, 
as  we  should  count  it,  on  the  evening  of  the  I3th.  But  the  best  authori 
ties  are  agreed  that  the  passover  was  killed  on  the  afternoon  of  the  I4th, 
and  eaten  the  following  night.  (Joseph.,  Bell.  Jud.  vi.  9,  3.)  In  the 
passage  cited  Josephus  speaks  of  the  lamb  as  killed  between  the  ninth 
and  eleventh  hours. 

t  That  is,  as  we  count  days ;  but  if  the  day  is  supposed  to  commence  with 
the  evening,  the  Last  Supper  and  the  Passion  took  place  on  the  same  day. 


268  THE   JOHANNINE    BOOKS.  [XV. 

And  now,  perhaps,  you  may  be  inclined  to  dismiss  the 
whole  argument ;  for  if  one  is  at  liberty  to  assume  things 
without  proof,  it  is  shorter  work  to  assume  at  once  the  thing 
you  wish  to  establish,  instead  of  professing  to  prove  it  by  an 
argument,  the  premisses  of  which  you  take  for  granted  with 
out  proof.  However,  as  I  have  entered  on  the  subject,  I  had 
better  lay  before  you  all  that  is  known  as  to  the  details  of 
these  early  Easter  controversies.  You  will  see  that  our 
information  is  so  scanty  that  if  we  try  to  define  particulars 
we  are  reduced  to  guessing.  But  it  will  appear,  I  think, 
that  the  Tubingen  guess  is  a  very  bad  one.  In  fact,  what 
can  be  less  probable  than  that  the  Asiatic  Churches  should 
make  the  Last  Supper  their  one  great  object  of  annual  com 
memoration,  leaving  the  Crucifixion  and  the  Resurrection 
uncelebrated  ? 

There  are  three  periods  in  the  second  century  in  which  we 
hear  of  these  paschal  disputes.  The  earliest  notice  of  the 
controversy  is  in  the  account  given  by  Irenseus  (Euseb.  v.  24) 
of  the  visit  of  Polycarp  to  Anicetus,  Bishop  of  Rome  ;*  on 
which  occasion  we  are  told  that  neither  could  Anicetus  pre 
vail  on  Polycarp  not  to  observe  [the  i4th  Nisan]  (/x/>)  T^peiv), 
inasmuch  as  he  had  always  observed  it  with  John  the  Apostle 
of  our  Lord,  and  the  other  Apostles  with  whom  he  had  asso 
ciated  ;  nor  could  Polycarp  prevail  on  Anicetus  to  observe 
(Trjpcw),  for  he  said  that  he  ought  to  follow  the  example  of 
the  presbyters  before  him.  Here  we  see  that  the  Eastern 
custom  was  f  to  observe'  the  day:  the  Western,  'not  to  ob 
serve  it.'  The  language  of  Irenzeus  is  so  vague,  that  it  even 
leaves  it  an  open  question  whether  the  Roman  bishops  before 
Soter  had  any  Easter  celebration  at  all,  for  he  speaks  of  the 
difference  between  Anicetus  and  Polycarp  as  more  funda- 


*  This  visit  probably  took  place  about  the  Easter  of  A.D.  154;  for  a 
later  date  would  not  fall  within  the  life  of  Polycarp,  nor  an  earlier  within 
the  episcopate  of  Anicetus.  There  is  no  evidence  that  Polycarp  visited 
Rome  in  order  to  confer  on  the  question  of  Easter  celebration ;  and  pro 
bably  the  diversity  of  practice  between  East  and  West  was  only  revealed 
through  the  occurrence  of  the  festival  during  the  time  of  Polycarp's  visit. 
It  is  likely  that  the  object  of  that  visit  was  in  order  that  the  Gnostic  pre 
tence  to  have  derived  their  peculiar  doctrines  by  secret  Apostolic  tradition 
might  be  refuted  by  the  testimony  of  an  actual  survivor  from  the  Apostolic 
generation.  (See  Iren.  iii.  3.) 


XV.]  HISTORY   OF   EARLY   PASCHAL   DISPUTES.  269 

mental  than  that  involved  in  the  Easter  disputes  of  his  own 
times.  At  any  rate,  we  are  not  told  in  what  way  the  Easterns 
observed  the  day,  nor  in  commemoration  of  what.  No  argu 
ment  seems  to  have  been  used  on  either  side  but  the  tradition 
of  the  respective  Churches.  It  does  not  appear  that  any 
question  of  doctrine  was  involved  :  and  Polycarp  and  Ani- 
cetus  parted  on  the  terms  of  agreeing  to  differ,  Anicetus 
even  in  token  of  respect  yielding  to  Polycarp  the  office  of 
consecrating  the  Eucharist  in  his  Church. 

It  seems  to  me  likely  that  Polycarp  was  right  in  thinking 
that  the  most  ancient  Christian  paschal  celebrations  did 
coincide  in  time  with  the  Jewish.  We  know  that  the  days 
of  the  week  on  which  our  Lord  suffered  and  rose  from  the 
dead  were  ever  kept  in  memory  by  the  Church,  and  were 
celebrated  from  the  earliest  times  ;  but  there  is  no  trust 
worthy  tradition  as  to  the  days  of  the  year  on  which  these 
events  occurred.  Our  complicated  rules  for  finding  Easter 
serve  to  attest  that  among  nations  whose  calendar  was 
governed  by  the  solar  year,  the  annual  celebration  of  our 
Lord's  death  and  resurrection  did  not  begin  until  so  long 
after  the  events  that  the  day  of  the  year  on  which  they 
occurred  was  not  certainly  known.  We  know,  however,  from 
the  Acts,  that  Christians  of  Jewish  birth  continued  to  ob 
serve  the  customs  of  their  nation,  including,  doubtless,  the 
passover.  And  not  merely  the  Judaizing  Christians,  but 
Paul  himself.  For  in  addition  to  what  we  elsewhere  read  of 
his  compliance  with  Jewish  institutions,  we  have  plain  indi 
cations  of  his  keeping  this  feast  at  Philippi,  when  St.  Luke 
tells  us  (Acts  xx.  6)  that  they  sailed  away  from  Philippi  after 
the  days  of  unleavened  bread,  St.  Paul's  wish  at  the  time 
being  to  keep  the  next  great  Jewish  feast,  that  of  Pentecost, 
at  Jerusalem.  He  says,  also,  in  the  First  Epistle  to  the 
Corinthians  (xvi.  8): — 'I  will  tarry  at  Ephesus  until  Pente 
cost.'  But  we  cannot  doubt,  either,  that  when  the  Apostles 
kept  the  passover  feast  they  would  give  it  a  Christian  aspect. 
The  very  first  recurrence  of  that  season  could  not  but  bring 
vividly  before  their  minds  all  the  great  events  which  the 
preceding  passover  had  witnessed.  Now  this  is  quite  inde 
pendent  of  any  theory  as  to  the  day  of  the  month  on  which 


270  THE   JOHANNINE    BOOKS.  [_XV. 

our  Lord  suffered.  If  we  suppose  that  He  suffered  on  the 
fifteenth,  then  the  Apostles'  celebration  of  the  passover  feast 
would,  doubtless,  especially  remind  them  of  the  last  occasion 
on  which  the  Lord  had  eaten  the  same  feast  with  them ;  if  we 
suppose  that  He  suffered  on  the  fourteenth,  their  passover 
feast  would  equally  call  to  memory  the  death  of  Him  who 
was  the  true  Passover.  To  myself  it  seems  certain,  that — 
since  the  great  difference  between  East  and  West  was  that 
the  East  only  celebrated  one  day,  the  West  a  whole  week, 
commemorating  the  Crucifixion  and  Resurrection  on  differ 
ent  days — the  Eastern  paschal  feast  must  have  included  a 
recollection  of  all  the  events  of  this  great  season.  We  find 
very  early  traces  that  the  feast  was  preceded  by  a  fast ;  and 
it  is  scarcely  credible  that,  as  the  Tubingen  theory  demands, 
Christians  would  have  fasted  up  to  the  day  before  their  anni 
versary  of  the  Crucifixion,  and  then  changed  their  mourning 
into  joy  on  that  which  had  been  at  first  a  day  of  mourning 
and  sorrow. 

Wherever  Jewish  Christians  formed  a  large  part  of  a  Church, 
the  time  of  their  paschal  feast  would  naturally  coincide  with 
that  of  the  Jews,  though  the  mode  of  celebration  might  be 
different.  The  Christians  would,  no  doubt,  make  their  com 
memoration  of  the  Lord's  death  in  that  rite  by  which  He 
Himself  instructed  them  to  show  it  forth.  But  they  probably 
agreed  with  the  Jews  in  the  use  of  unleavened  bread  at  this 
season ;  for  I  would  understand  .Paul  as  giving  a  spiritual 
interpretation  to  an  already  existing  custom,  when  he  says 
(i  Cor.  v.  7),  '  Christ  our  Passover  is  sacrificed  for  us  :  there 
fore  let  us  keep  the  feast,  not  with  old  leaven,  neither  with 
the  leaven  of  malice  and  wickedness  ;  but  with  the  unleavened 
bread  of  sincerity  and  truth.'  While  the  time  of  celebration 
where  Jews  were  numerous  naturally  coincided  with  that  of 
the  Jewish  passover,  it  no  less  naturally  was  independent  of 
it  where  Jews  were  few.  Afterwards,  when  the  hostility  be 
tween  Jews  and  Christians  became  more  intense,  it  was  made 
a  point  to  celebrate  on  a  different  day  from  the  Jews ;  and 
to  this  seems  to  be  owing  the  rule,  which  we  still  observe, 
that  if  the  full  moon  falls  on  a  Sunday,  Easter  is  not  till  the 
Sunday  after. 


XV.]  QUARTODECIMAN   USE    OF    FOURTH    GOSPEL.  271 

The  second  time  at  which  we  hear  of  paschal  disputes  is 
about  the  year  170,  when  we  are  told  that  there  was  much 
disputing  on  this  subject  at  Laodicea;  and  that  the  celebrated 
Melito  of  Sardis  wrote  a  book  on  this  subject.  The  occasion 
of  it  appears  to  have  been  that  a  leading  Christian  named 
Sagaris  suffered  martyrdom  at  Laodicea  on  the  i4th  Nisan ; 
and  that  when  in  the  following  year  great  numbers  of  Chris 
tians  came  together  thither  from  different  cities  in  order  to 
celebrate  the  anniversary  of  his  death,  the  diversity  of  their 
Easter  usages  arrested  attention  and  excited  controversy. 
Eusebius,  who  tells  us  so  much  (iv.  26),  has  not  preserved 
enough  of  Melito's  writings  to  inform  us  of  the  particulars  of 
the  dispute  ;  but  we  know  otherwise  that  Melito  was  a  Quar- 
todeciman  as  being  one  of  the  leading  bishops  of  Asia  Minor. 
There  are,  however,  two  short  fragments  purporting  to  come 
from  another  celebrated  contemporary  bishop  of  the  same 
district,  Apollinaris  of  Hierapolis,  these  fragments  having 
been  preserved  by  an  anonymous  writer  of  the  sixth  century.* 
In  these  Apollinaris  argues  that  our  Lord  suffered  on  the 
i4th.  He  evidently  used  St.  John's  Gospel,  for  he  refers  to 
the  water  and  blood  which  came  from  our  Lord's  side.  It  is 
much  disputed  whether,  as  the  Tubingen  school  assert,  Apol 
linaris  was  one  of  a  minority  in  Asia  Minor  who  had  been 
converted  to  the  Western  custom,  and  who  wrote  in  oppo 
sition  to  Melito  ;  or  whether  he  and  Melito  were  on  the  same 
side — both  Quartodecimans,  and  only  contending  with  those 
who  set  on  wrong  grounds  the  celebration  of  the  i4th  day. 
For  our  purpose  it  is  immaterial  to  decide  the  question.  At 
this  stage  of  the  controversy  the  arguments  did  not  rest 
merely  on  traditional  custom,  but  Scripture  was  appealed  to. 
And  Apollinaris  argues  from  St.  John's  Gospel  that  the  i4th 
was  the  day  on  which  our  Lord  suffered,  and  accuses  those 
who  held  the  opposite  theory  of  so  interpreting  the  Gospels 
as  to  set  them  at  variance  with  each  other.  It  is  evident  that 
at  this  time  the  authority  of  St.  John's  Gospel  was  recognized 
by  the  Quartodecimans  ;  of  which  we  have  a  further  proof  in 
the  fact  that  Melito  counted  our  Lord's  ministry  as  lasting 

*  Paschal  Chron.  (Bonn  edit.),  p.  12  ;  Routh,  Rell.  Sac.  i.  160. 


272  THE   JOHANNINE    BOOKS.  [XV. 

for  three  years,*  a  deduction  which  cannot  be  made  from  the 
Synoptic  Gospels  without  the  help  of  John's. 

The  third  stage  of  the  dispute  was  at  the  end  of  the  century, 
when  Victor  of  Rome  excommunicated  the  Asiatic  Churches 
for  retaining  their  ancient  customs.  In  excuse  for  Victor  it 
must  be  said  that  trouble  had  been  caused  him  by  a  presbyter 
of  his  own  Church,  Blastus,  who  wanted  to  introduce  the 
Quartodeciman  practice  at  Rome.  A  man  might  be  very 
tolerant  of  the  usages  of  a  foreign  Church  as  long  as  they 
were  kept  at  a  distance,  but  might  think  himself  bound  to  put 
them  down  when  they  were  schismatically  introduced  into  his 
own  Church.f  Victor  was  boldly  resisted  by  Polycrates,  in  a 
letter,  of  which  a  most  interesting  fragment  is  preserved  by 
Eusebius  (v.  24).  In  this  Polycrates  appeals  in  defence  of  the 
Asiatic  custom  to  'John,  who  leaned  on  the  Lord's  breast'  at 
supper.  I  need  not  remind  you  that  this  description  of  John 
is  derived  from  the  fourth  Gospel.  Thus,  it  seems  to  me 
that  the  appeal  which  has  been  made  to  the  Quartodeciman 
controversy,  instead  of  being  unfavourable  to  the  authority 
of  the  fourth  Gospel,  really  establishes  its  great  antiquity. 
The  only  two  Quartodeciman  champions  of  whom  we  know 
anything,  Melito  and  Polycrates,  both  owned  the  authority  of 
that  Gospel.  To  these  I  am  inclined  to  add  Apollinaris  ;  but 
if  the  Tubingen  school  are  right  in  saying  that  he  was  not  one 
of  the  Quartodecimans,  and  that  he  used  St.  John's  Gospel  in 
arguing  against  them,  at  least  he  does  so  without  any  sus 
picion  that  its  authority  would  be  questioned  by  his  opponents. 
In  fact,  if  it  could  be  shown  that  the  fourth  Gospel  was  at 
variance  with  Quartodeciman  celebration,  the  fact  of  its  re 
ception  by  the  leading  men  of  that  party  would  prove  that  the 
authority  of  that  Gospel  must  have  been  well  established 


*  This  appears  from  a  passage  preserved  by  Anastasius  Sinaita :  see 
Routh,  Rell.  Sac.  i.  121. 

f  The  Catholics  generally  looked  on  the  Quartodecimans  as  quarrelsome 
people  who  schismatically  refused  to  conform  to  the  custom  of  the  rest  of 
the  Christian  world.  Thus  Hippolytus  (Ref.  viii.  18)  describes  them  as 
<f>L\6v€t.Koi  rr)v  (pixriv,  iSicarai  T^V  "yvSxfiv,  yuax^wre/jot  rbv  rpSirov ;  and 
Athanasius,  quoted  in  the  Paschal  Chronicle  (p.  9,  Bonn  edit.),  as  q>i\ovei- 
KOVVTCS,  £<f)€vp6vTes  eavTo'is  £riT7]/j.aTa,  irpo(pd(T€i  IJLZV  rov  ff 
epyc?  5e  rrjs  iSias  epiSos  X<*-Ptv 


XV.]  ASTRONOMICAL   CALCULATIONS.  273 

before  the  Quartodeciman  disputes  arose,  else  those  against 
whom  it  was  used  in  controversy  would  surely  have  questioned 
its  authority,  had  there  been  any  ground  for  suspicion. 

I  have  said  that  it  is  more  than  doubtful  whether  it  was  at 
all  essential  to  the  Quartodeciman  system  to  count  the  i5th 
as  the  day  of  the  Saviour's  Passion  ;  but  in  any  case  it  is 
absurd  to  suppose  that  those  who  so  computed  denied  the 
authority  of  the  fourth  Gospel.  This  very  point  is  disputed 
by  harmonists  to  this  day:  some  decide  for  the  i4th,  some 
for  the  1 5th  ;  and  yet  we  know  that  the  one  party  and  the 
other  alike  admit  John's  Gospel  and  Matthew's  as  of  equal 
authority. 


NOTE. 

Astronomical  calculations  have  been  used  to  determine  the  day  of 
the  Jewish  month  on  which  our  Lord  suffered.  We  may  assume  it  as 
certain  that  He  suffered  on  a  Friday.  I  am  aware  that  Canon  Westcott 
(Gospels,  p.  345)  offers  arguments  in  support  of  the  view  that  the  day  was 
Thursday  ;  but  the  point  is  one  on  which  it  does  not  seem  to  me  possible 
that  Christian  tradition  should  go  wrong.  If  this  day  was  the  I5th  Nisan, 
so  also  must  the  ist  of  Nisan  have  been  Friday.  In  that  case,  therefore, 
the  year  must  have  been  one  in  which  the  passover  month  began  on  a 
Friday.  On  the  other  hand,  if  it  was  on  the  I4th  He  suffered,  the  I5th, 
and  consequently  the  ist  of  the  month,  must  have  been  Saturday.  Now 
among  the  Jews,  the  evening  when  the  new  moon  was  first  visible  in  the 
heavens  would  be  the  commencement  of  a  new  month.  Astronomical 
tables  enable  us  to  determine  for  any  month  the  time  of  'conjunction:' 
that  is  to  say,  the  moment  when  absolutely  nothing  but  the  dark  side  of 
the  moon  was  turned  towards  the  earth.  At  that  moment,  of  course,  it 
would  be  invisible,  and  it  would  not  be  until  about  thirty  hours  afterwards 
that  the  crescent  of  the  young  moon  might  be  seen  after  sunset. 

I  had  computed  the  new  moons  for  the  possible  years  of  the  Passion, 
using  simple  rules  given  by  De  Morgan  in  his  Book  of  Almanacs,  when 
I  found  that  the  table  had  been  already  given  in  Wieseler's  Synopsis 
(p.  407,  Cambridge  ed.)  from  a  calculation  made  by  a  German  astronomer, 
Wurm  ;  and  I  have  since  found  that  the  same  computation  had  been 
made  for  Mr.  M'Clellan  by  Professor  Adams  (see  M'Clellan's  Commen 
tary,  N.T.,  p.  493).  The  year  A.D.  29  is  that  which  Hippolytus  sup 
posed  to  be  that  of  the  Passion ;  and  this  date  was  adopted  by  many 
subsequent  fathers.  I  have  already  mentioned  (p.  201)  that  Hippolytus 
used  an  erroneous  table  of  full  moons,  which  led  him  to  fix  the  date  of 
the  Passion  as  March  25th.  But  that  was  so  many  days  after  the  actual 

T 


274  ASTRONOMICAL  CALCULATIONS.  [XV. 

occurrence  of  the  full  moon,  that  it  is  inconceivable  the  passover  could 
have  been  kept  on  that  day ;  and,  from  the  considerations  that  have  been 
just  explained,  it  can  be  inferred  that  the  Passion  did  not  take  place  on  any 
day  in  that  year.  The  astronomical  new  moon  took  place  about  eight  in 
the  evening  of  Saturday,  April  2nd.  On  Sunday  night  the  moon  would 
be  too  young  to  be  visible  ;  but  on  Monday  night  it  would  be  forty- six 
hours'  old,  when  it  could  not  fail  to  be  seen,  so  that  that  evening  would  be 
pretty  sure  to  be  the  first  of  the  month.  The  month  could  not  possibly 
begin  either  on  Friday  or  Saturday.  But  in  the  year  30  the  conjunction 
took  place  at  eight  in  the  evening  of  Wednesday,  March  22nd,  and  we 
infer  in  the  same  way  that  the  month  began  on  Friday  the  24th.  This, 
therefore,  is  a  possible  year  of  the  Passion.  Proceeding  in  like  manner,, 
we  find  that  the  month  began  in  31  on  a  Tuesday,  and  in  32  on  a  Monday. 
In  33,  however,  the  conjunction  took  place  at  one  on  the  afternoon  of 
Thursday,  March  igth.  At  six  o'clock  next  evening  the  moon  would  be 
29  hours'  old,  and  probably  would  be  visible ;  but  it  is  possible  it  might 
not  have  been  observed  till  Saturday  evening.  Similar  arguments  lead  us^ 
to  reject  the  year  28,  but  admit  27  as  a  possible  year,  in  which  case  the  day 
would  be  Friday.  The  following  table  exhibits  the  date  of  new  moon  and 
the  probable  first  day  of  the  passover  month  for  the  years  A.D.  27-36  : — 

A.D.  Time  of  true  New  Moon.  Moon  first  visible. 

27.  March  26,  8  P.M.,  ..  ..  Friday,  March  28. 

28.  March  15,  2  A.M.,  . .  . .  Tuesday,  March  16. 

29.  April  2,  8  P.M.,  . .  . .  . .  Monday,  April  4. 

30.  March  22,  8  P.M.  . .  . .  Friday,  March  24. 

31.  March  12,  i  A.M.,  ..  ..  Tuesday,  March  13. 

32.  March  29,  u  P.M.,  . .  . .  Monday,  March  31. 

(  Friday,  March  20,  or 
33-        March  19,  i  P.M.,         . .         . .  (  Saturday>  March  2I> 

I  March  9,  9  A.M.,  or      . .          . .     Wednesday,  March  10. 
April  7,  i  P.M.,  (Thursday,  April  8,  or 

\  Friday,  April  9. 

35.  March  28,  6  A.M.,         . .          . .     Tuesday,  March  29. 

36.  March  16,  6  P.M.,          ..          ..     Sunday,  March  1 8. 

The  year  30  is  that  which  Wieseler  looks  on  as  the  probable  year  of  the 
Passion  ;  and  since  in  that  year  the  passover  month  began  on  a  Friday,  he 
concludes  that  our  Lord  suffered  on  the  I5th  Nisan,  as  the  Synoptic 
Gospels  would  lead  us  to  suppose.  But  everything  turns  on  the  question, 
How  did  the  Jewish  days  commence  ?  Caspari  (Chronological  and  Geo 
graphical  Introduction  to  Life  of  Christ,  Edinb.,  1876,  pp.  17,  196)  has 
pointed  out  that  if  the  Jewish  days  began  with  the  evening,  the  conclusion 
is  just  the  opposite  of  what  Wieseler  supposed.  For  the  appearance  of  the 
moon  on  Friday  evening  was  on  that  supposition  the  beginning,  not  the 
end,  of  the  first  day  of  the  month,  which  would  include  Saturday.  The 
1 5th  Nisan,  therefore,  was  also  a  Saturday,  and  the  day  of  the  Passion 


XVI.]  THE    FOURTH    EVANGELIST   A   JEW.  275 

(assuming  it  to  have  been  a  Friday)  must  have  fallen  on  the  I4th,  which 
was  ;th  April.  On  the  other  hand,  it  is  urged  that  Josephus,  in  the 
passage  cited  (Note,  p.  267),  speaks  of  the  lamb  as  killed  between  the 
9th  and  nth  hours,  from  which  language  it  is  inferred  that  though,  for 
religious  purposes,  the  day  began  with  the  evening,  yet  in  ordinary  Jewish 
language  the  day  was  counted  as  beginning  in  the  morning. 


XVI. 

PART    V. 

THE    GOSPEL  AND   THE    MINOR    EPISTLES. 

THE  result  at  which  I  arrived  (p.  243),  from  a  comparison 
of  the  diction  of  the  Gospel  and  the  Apocalypse,  left  it  an 
open  question  whether  the  former  were  written  by  the  author 
of  the  latter,  or  by  a  disciple  of  his.  To-day  I  propose  to 
make  a  further  examination  of  the  contents  of  the  Gospel, 
with  the  view  of  obtaining,  if  possible,  a  more  definite 
conclusion.* 

I.  The  author  of  the  fourth  Gospel  was  a  Jew. 

(i)  I  remark,  in  the  first  place,  the  familiarity  with  the  Old 
Testament  which  he  exhibits.  Quotations  from  it  occur  as 
frequently  as  in  what  has  been  regarded  as  the  Jewish  Gos 
pel,  St.  Matthew's ;  and  in  two  or  three  cases  they  are  made 
directly  from  the  Hebrew,  not  the  Septuagint.  These  cases 
are,  the  passage  from  the  4ist  Psalm  (xiii.  18),  'He  that 
eateth  bread  with  me  hath  lifted  up  his  heel  against  me,' 
and  that  (xix.  37)  from  Zechariah  xii.  10,  'They  shall  look 
on  him  whom  they  pierced.'  The  prophecy  also  (Isaiah  vi. 
9,  10)  which  is  so  often  referred  to  in  the  New  Testament, 
and  which  is  quoted  by  St.  Matthew  (xiii.  14)  nearly  in  the 
words  of  the  Septuagint,  appears  in  quite  a  different  render 
ing  in  St.  John  (xii.  40). 

*  In  this  lecture  I  chiefly  reproduce  the  arguments  of  Dr.  Sanday 
(Fourth  Gospel,  ch.  19),  with  the  additions  made  to  them  by  Professor 
Westcott  in  the  Introduction  to  his  Commentary  on  St.  John's  Gospel. 
I  also  make  use  of  an  appendix  added  by  Renan  to  the  I3th  edition  of  his 
Vie  de  Jesus,  in  which  he  justifies  the  preference  he  had  expressed  (see 
p.  212)  for  the  narrative  as  given  in  the  fourth  Gospel. 

T  2 


276  THE   JOHANNINE   BOOKS.  [XVI. 

(2)  Next  I  note  his  acquaintance  with  the  Jewish  feasts. 
It  is  remarkable  that  this  Evangelist  (said  to  be  anti-Jewish) 
has  alone  recorded  our  Lord's  attendance  at  these  feasts,  and 
has  used  them  as  land-marks  to  divide  the  history.     It  is  in 
this  way  we  learn,  what  we  should  not  have  found  from  the 
Synoptic    Gospels,   that   our   Lord's   public   ministry   lasted 
more   than   one   year.      Three   passovers  are  directly  men 
tioned  (ii.  13,  23;  vi.  4;  xiii.  i,  xviii.  28);    besides  another 
feast,   named  generally  'a  feast  of  the  Jews'  (v.   i),   with 
respect  to  which  commentators  are  divided  whether  or  not 
it  was  a  passover.     The  feast  of  Tabernacles  is  spoken  of 
with  a  note  that  the  last  was  the  '  great  day  of  the  feast ' 
(vii.  37),  and  this  verse  contains  what  seems  a  plain  allu 
sion  to  the   rite,  practised  at  this  feast,   of  pouring   forth 
water  from  the  pool  of  Siloam.     Mention  is  likewise  made 
of  that  feast  of  the  later  Jews,  instituted  without  any  express 
divine  command,  which  commemorated  the  dedication  of  the 
Temple  after  its  profanation  by  Antiochus  Epiphanes  (x.  22). 

(3)  In  connexion  with  the  preceding,  I  note  the  acquaint 
ance  shown  with  Jewish  customs  and  habits  of  thought.  There 
are,  for  instance,  repeated  references  to  the  customs  in  con 
nexion  with  purification  :  the  '  waterpots  after  the  manner  of 
the  purifying  of  the  Jews' (ii.  5);  the  question  about  purifying 
between  John's  disciples  and  the  Jews  (iii.  25);  the  coming 
up  of  Jews  to  Jerusalem,  previous  to  the  passover,  in  order 
to  purify  themselves  (xi.  55) ;  the  fear  of  our  Lord's  accusers 
to  defile  themselves,  previous  to  the  passover,  by  entering  the 
heathen  Praetorium  (xviii.  28)  ;  and  the  Jewish  scruple  against 
allowing  the  bodies  to  remain  on  the  cross  on  the  Sabbath 
day  (xix.  31).    We  learn,  moreover,  from  St.  John  (what  other 
testimony  confirms)  that  baptism  was  not  a  rite  newly  insti 
tuted  by  John  the  Baptist,  but  one  known  to  the  Jews  before  ; 
for  the  question  is  not  put  to  the  Baptist  (i.  25),  What  is  this 
new  thing  that  thou  doest  ?  but  he  is  asked  why  he  baptized, 
seeing  that  he  claimed  for  himself  no  official  position,  neither 
to  be  the  Christ,  nor  Elias,  nor  '  the  prophet.'     Then,  again, 
the  Evangelist,  in  his  well-known  narrative  (ch.  iv.),  shows 
his  knowledge  of  the  state  of  feeling  between  the  Jews  and 
Samaritans  (see  also  viii.  48) ;   he  is  familiar  with  current 


XVI.]  THE    FOURTH    EVANGELIST   A   JEW.  277 

Rabbinical  and  popular  notions,  as,  for  instance,  concerning 
the  connexion  between  sin  and  bodily  suffering,  in  the  ques 
tion  (ix.  2),  'Who  did  sin,  this  man  or  his  parents,  that  he 
was  born  blind  ?';  as  to  the  importance  attached  to  the  reli 
gious  schools  (vii.  15);  the  disparagement  of  the  'dispersion' 
(vii.  35);  and  with  the  Rabbinical  rule  against  holding  con 
verse  with  a  woman  (iv.  27).  I  have  already  had  occasion  to 
notice  one  passage  which  has  been  a  terrible  stumbling-block 
in  the  way  of  those  who  would  ascribe  the  book  to  a  Gnosti- 
cizing  Gentile  of  the  second  century.  In  the  very  passage 
where  the  claims  of  spiritual  religion,  apart  from  any  dis 
tinction  of  place  and  race,  are  most  strongly  set  forth,  the 
prerogatives  of  the  Jew  are  asserted  as  strongly  as  they  are 
by  St.  Paul  himself  when  he  has  to  answer  the  question, 
'  What  advantage  then  hath  the  Jew  ? '  This  Gospel  puts 
into  our  Lord's  mouth  the  words  (iv.  22),  '  Ye  worship  ye 
know  not  what :  we  know  what  we  worship ;  for  salvation  is 
of  the  Jews.'  If  these  words  be  invention,  assuredly  they  are 
not  a  Gentile  or  a  Gnostic  invention  (see  also  p.  208). 

I  do  not  present  the  argument  from  the  language,  because 
to  enter  into  details  would  make  it  necessary  to  discuss  what 
phrases  can  positively  be  asserted  to  be  Hebraisms ;  but  the 
whole  colouring  of  the  diction,  and  still  more  of  the  thoughts, 
is  essentially  Hebrew.* 

The  best  argument  f  that  can  be  used  in  opposition  to 
those  I  have  produced  is  that  founded  on  the  constant  use 
of  the  phrase  '  the  Jews,'  which  seems  to  imply  that  the 
writer  was  not  a  Jew.  But  the  use  of  the  phrase  presents 
no  difficulty  when  we  remember  the  late  date  of  the  Gos 
pel,  and  that  it  was  written  in  a  Greek  city  where  'the  Jews' 
were  in  all  probability  the  bitterest  adversaries  of  the  Chris 
tian  Church.  I  need  only  refer  to  the  hard  things  said  of 

*  For  proofs,  see  Sanday,  p.  289 ;  Westcott,  pp.  vii.,  li. 

t  The  description  of  Caiaphas  as  'high-priest  that  year'  (xi.  49,  51  ; 
xviii.  13)  does  not  oblige  us  to  suppose  the  writer  to  be  so  ignorant  of  Jewish 
affairs  as  to  imagine  the  high-priesthood  to  be  an  annual  office.  All  that 
the  words  assert  is,  that  in  that  year  when  '  one  man  died  for  the  people,' 
Caiaphas  was  the  high-priest.  The  repeated  changes  made  by  the  govern 
ment  in  the  high-priesthood  at  this  time  are  mentioned  by  Josephus  (Antt. 
xviii.  2,  2). 


278  THE   JOHANNINE   BOOKS.  [XVI. 

'the  Jews'  many  years  before  by  St.  Paul  (i  Thess.  ii.  14-16), 
who  more  than  any  other  gloried  in  being  able  to  call  himself 
a  Jew  (see  p.  30).* 

II.  The  writer  was  a  Jew  of  Palestine. 
We  may  infer  this  from  his  minute  acquaintance  with  the 
topography  of  the  Holy  Land.  Thus  he  knows  the  small 
town  Cana  of  Galilee  (ii.  i,  u  ;  iv.  46;  xxi.  2),  a  place  not 
noticed  by  any  earlier  writer  :  Bethsaida,  the  native  place  of 
Philip,  Peter,  and  Andrew  (i.  44) ;  Bethany  beyond  Jordan 
(i.  28),  for  this  seems  to  be  the  true  reading  instead  of  Beth- 
abara,  of  the  common  text ;  he  knows  the  exact  distance  from 
Jerusalem  of  the  better  known  Bethany  (xi.  18) ;  he  knows 
the  city  Ephraim  near  the  wilderness  (xi.  54);  .2Enonf  near 
to  Salim,  where  John  baptized  (iii.  23)  ;  Sychar  the  city  of 
Samaria,  where  Jacob's  well  was,  of  which  the  Evangelist 
tells  that  the  '  well  is  deep  '  (iv.  1 1 ),  as  indeed  it  is,  more  than 
a  hundred  feet ;  he  knows  the  whole  aspect  of  the  place  ;  the 
mountain  where  the  Samaritans  worshipped,  that  is  to  say, 
Mount  Gerizim,  which  rises  to  a  sheer  height  of  eight  hun 
dred  feet  above  the  village,  and  where  the  remains  of  a  temple 
are  still  visible ;  and  he  knows  the  rich  corn-fields  at  the  base 
of  the  mountain  (v.  35)4 

There  is  the  same  familiarity  with  the  topography  of  Jeru 
salem.  He  speaks  of  Bethesda,  the  pool  near  the  sheep  gate, 
having  five  porches  ;  of  the  treasury  at  the  Temple ;  of 
Solomon's  porch  ;  of  the  pool  Siloam,  which  name  he  cor 
rectly  derives  as  the  '  sending  forth  '  of  waters  ;  of  the  brook 

*  In  John  vii.  i,  ot  'lovSouoi  seems  to  mean  the  inhabitants  of  Judaea  as 
opposed  to  the  Galileans,  a  use  of  the  word  natural  enough  in  a  Galilean 
writer.  The  word  will  bear  this  meaning  in  most  of  the  passages  where  it 
occurs  in  this  Gospel,  of  course  setting  those  aside  where  the  word  would 
in  any  case  be  used  in  a  book  intended  for  Gentile  readers,  as,  for  instance, 
where  customs  or  feasts  of  '  the  Jews '  are  spoken  of.  But  vi.  41,  52,  will 
not  admit  this  interpretation,  since  it  is  not  said  that  the  objectors  were 
visitors  from  Judaaa. 

f  On  this  Renan  remarks,  Vie  de  Jesus,  p.  492,  «  On  ignore,  il  est  vrai, 
oil  etait  Salim  ;  mais  A-ivw  est  un  trait  de  lumiere.  C'est  le  mot  ^Enawan, 
pluriel  Chaldeen  de  Ain  ou  J£n,  "fontaine."  Comment  voulez-vous  que 
des  sectaires  hellenistes  d'Ephese  eussent  devine  cela  ?  Us  n'eussent 
nomme  aucune  localite,  ou  ils  en  eussent  nomme  une  tres-connue,  ou  ils 
eussent  forge  un  mot  impossible  sous  le  rapport  de  1'etymologie  semitique.' 

J  See  Stanley's  Sinai  and  Palestine,  ch.  v.,  ii.,  p.  240,  2nd  edit. 


XVI.]         THE   FOURTH   EVANGELIST  A   PALESTINIAN.  279 

Kedron ;  of  the  place  that  is  called  the  Pavement,  but  in  the 
Hebrew  Gabbatha  ;  of  the  place  of  the  skull,  called  in  Hebrew 
Golgotha.  I  would  also  notice  the  graphic  description  of  the 
aspect  of  the  Temple  on  the  occasion  of  its  cleansing  by  our 
Lord  ;  the  animals  for  sacrifice,  sheep,  oxen,  and  doves, 
crowding  its  courts  ;  and  the  money-changers,  who  are 
described  as  sitting,  the  sellers  of  the  animals  naturally 
standing. 

Now  even  a  single  topographical  reference  may  give  a 
revelation  of  the  writer's  nationality.  I  remember,  at  the 
beginning  of  the  Crimean  war,  when  we  knew  nothing  here  of 
the  authorship  of  the  brilliant  war  correspondence  which 
began  to  appear  in  the  Times,  how  a  comparison,  in  one  of 
the  early  letters,  of  some  scenery  to  that  of  'the  Dargle,' 
suggested  to  us  the  inference,  This  writer  must  be  an  Irish 
man.  If  a  novel  appeared  in  which  the  scene  was  laid  in 
Ireland,  and  mention  freely  made  of  small  Irish  localities, 
and  of  different  Dublin  public  buildings,  we  should  feel  little 
doubt  that  the  writer  was  either  an  Irishman,  or  one  who  had 
spent  some  time  in  Ireland  ;  and  yet  I  need  not  say  how  much 
easier  it  is  now,  than  in  the  days  when  the  Gospel  was  written, 
for  a  writer  to  get  up  from  books  the  details  which  would  add 
verisimilitude  to  his  narrative. 

The  work  of  a  native  of  Palestine  may  also  be  recognized 
in  the  knowledge  of  local  jealousies  which  the  writer  exhibits. 
One  outside  a  country  thinks  little  of  the  distinctions  between 
different  provinces.  But  here  we  seem  to  have  a  picture 
drawn  by  a  Galilean  who  had  smarted  under  the  haughty 
contempt  with  which  the  inhabitants  of  Jerusalem  regarded 
his  province  :  '  Can  there  any  good  thing  come  out  of  Naza 
reth  ?'  (i.  46).  '  Shall  Christ  come  out  of  Galilee  ?  '  (vii.  41). 
*  Search  and  look,  for  out  of  Galilee  ariseth  no  prophet'  (vii. 
52).  Note  also  the  scorn  of  the  rulers  and  the  Pharisees  for 
the  opinion  of  the  vulgar :  '  This  people  who  knoweth  not 
the  law  are  cursed '  (vii.  49). 

Further,  the  writer  is  as  familiar  with  the  history  of  the 
Temple  as  with  its  external  aspect.  One  of  the  data  used  at 
present  in  calculating  the  chronology  of  our  Saviour's  ministry 
is  the  remark  recorded  by  St.  John  (ii.  20),  '  Forty  and  six 


280  THE  JOHANNINE    BOOKS.  [XVI. 

years  was  this  Temple  in  building.'  Counting  the  commence 
ment  of  the  forty-six  years  from  the  time  recorded  byjosephus, 
we  obtain  a  date  for  our  Lord's  ministry  in  close  agreement 
with  what  we  are  led  to  by  other  considerations.  But  is  it 
credible  either  that  a  forger  in  the  second  century,  when  the 
science  of  chronology  was  unknown,  could  have  had  the 
information  rightly  to  state  the  interval  between  the  begin 
ning  of  the  Temple  building  and  our  Lord's  ministry,  or, 
that  if  he  had  made  a  random  guess,  he  could  have  hit  the 
truth  so  accurately  ? 

III.  I  come  next  to  the  question,  It  having  been  thus 
proved  that  the  writer  was  a  Jew,  was  he  a  Jew  of  the  first  or 
of  the  second  century  ?  And  this  question  is  not  difficult  to 
answer,  for  the  subjects  which  engage  interest,  and  which 
excite  controversy,  differ  from  age  to  age.  Even  in  the 
lifetime  of  one  man  they  change.  Compare  Paul's  earlier 
Epistles  with  his  later,  compare  the  Epistles  to  the  Romans 
and  Galatians  with  those  to  Timothy  and  Titus,  and  you  will 
find  that  the  controversy  about  justification  with  or  without 
the  works  of  the  law,  which  is  the  main  subject  of  the  earlier 
Epistles,  is  hardly  alluded  to  in  the  later.  This  is  one  of 
the  tests  by  which  was  exposed  the  forgery  of  the  Decretal 
Epistles  ascribed  to  the  early  Popes,  that  the  controversies 
and  topics  with  which  these  letters  deal  are  not  those  of  the 
centuries  when  the  alleged  writers  lived,  but  those  of  the 
ninth  century,  when  the  letters  were  really  written.  Now, 
test  the  fourth  Gospel  in  this  way,  and  you  will  find  that  the 
controversies  with  which  it  deals,  and  the  feelings  which  it 
assumes,  are  those  of  the  first  century  not  the  second.  The 
Messianic  idea  that  pervades  the  Gospel  is  not  that  which 
prevailed  after  the  Gnostic  heresies  arose,  but  that  which 
existed  before  Jerusalem  was  destroyed,  when  the  Jews  still 
expected  the  Messiah  to  be  a  deliverer  who  should  establish 
a  temporal  sovereignty  and  make  the  Jews  the  rulers  of  the 
surrounding  nations.  This  Evangelist  tells  us,  what  we  do 
not  learn  from  the  Synoptic  Gospels,  that  the  impression 
produced  by  the  miracle  of  feeding  the  multitude  was  such 
that  they  were  about  to  come  by  force  to  make  our  Lord  a 
king,  evidently  believing  that  they  had  now  found  him  who 


XVI.]       THE  GOSPEL  A  WORK  OF  THE  FIRST  CENTURY.  281 

would  lead  them  against  the  Romans,  and  victoriously  restore 
.the  kingdom  to  Israel.  And  we  are  told  that  our  Lord  was 
obliged  to  withdraw  Himself  from  their  importunity  to  a 
mountain  alone.  It  was  because  He  refused  to  proclaim  a 
'  kingdom  of  this  world '  that  the  Jews  found  it  hard  to  own 
as  their  Messiah  one  who,  though  He  could  preach  and  heal, 
yet  seemed  unable  to  bring  them  the  deliverance  or  the  glory 
which  they  desired.  St.  John  represents  the  prudent  Jewish 
rulers  as  resolved  to  put  down  the  prophesying  of  Jesus, 
because  they  feared  that  the  political  consequences  of  His 
assertion  of  His  kingdom  would  be  an  unsuccessful  revolt 
against  foreign  rule,  the  result  of  which  would  be  that  the 
Romans  would  come  and  take  away  their  place  and  nation 
(xi.  48).  And  St.  John  brings  out  with  great  clearness  the 
fact  that  it  was  as  a  pretender  to  temporal  sovereignty  that 
Jesus  was  accused  before  Pilate,  who,  though  personally  in 
clined  to  dismiss  the  complaint,  was  withheld  from  doing  so 
through  fear  of  exciting  the  jealousy  of  his  own  emperor  by 
his  remissness,  if  in  such  a  matter  as  this  he  showed  himself 
*  not  Caesar's  friend' (xix.  12).  Remember  that  the  state  of 
Jewish  feeling  which  I  have  described  was  quelled  by  the 
destruction  of  Jerusalem,  and  judge  whether  it  is  probable 
that  a  writer  of  the  next  century  would  have  been  able  to 
throw  himself  into  the  midst  of  these  hopes  and  feelings,  and 
to  reproduce  them  as  if  they  were  part  of  the  atmosphere 
which  he  had  himself  breathed.* 

Then,  again,  the  topics  introduced  are  those  which  were 
discussed  in  our  Lord's  time,  and  not  a  hundred  years  after 
wards.  For  example,  what  Gnostic  of  the  second  century 
would  have  cared  to  discuss  a  breach  of  the  Sabbath,  and  to 
inquire  when  the  duty  of  Sabbath  observance  (admitted  to 
be  the  general  rule)  was  overborne  by  a  higher  obligation  ? 

*  The  argument  in  this  paragraph,  which  had  been  forcibly  urged  by 
Sanday  (p.  291)  has  been  parried  by  the  remark  that  in  Barcochba's  rebel 
lion,  in  the  reign  of  Hadrian,  there  was  a  revival  of  Jewish  nationalist  and 
anti-Roman  feeling.  But  the  argument  at  least  obliges  us  to  choose  be 
tween  the  accepted  date  of  the  Gospel  and  a  date  later  than  A.D.  135,  when 
Barcochba's  rebellion  was  put  down.  And  even  leaving  out  of  sight  the 
use  made  of  the  Gospel  by  Justin  Martyr,  I  cannot  reconcile  so  late  a  date- 
with  the  other  indications  mentioned  above. 


282  THE   JOHANNINE    BOOKS.  [XVI. 

See,  again,  how  familiar  the  writer  is  with  the  expectations 
which  before  our  Lord's  coming  the  Jews  had  formed  of  what 
their  Messiah  was  to  be.  He  was  not  to  be  from  Galilee : 
'  Shall  Christ  come  out  of  Galilee  ?  Hath  not  the  Scripture 
said  that  Christ  cometh  of  the  seed  of  David,  and  out  of  the 
town  of  Bethlehem,  where  David  was  ?'  (vii.  42) ;  {We  have 
heard  out  of  the  law  that  Christ  abideth  for  ever '  (xii.  34) ; 
'  We  know  this  man  whence  he  is,  but  when  Christ  cometh  no 
man  knoweth  whence  he  is  '  (vii.  27) ;  '  When  Christ  cometh, 
will  he  do  more  miracles  than  these  which  this  man  hath 
done  ?'  (vii.  31). 

On  the  other  hand,  the  writer  shows  no  knowledge  of  the 
controversies  raised  by  the  Gnostic  heresies  which  broke 
out  early  in  the  second  century.  The  problem  that  most 
occupied  the  minds  of  the  Gnostic  speculators  was  how 
to  account  for  the  origin  of  evil,  and  the  solution  they 
generally  agreed  in  offering  was  that  evil  was  inherent  in 
matter.  It  followed  that  the  creation  of  matter  could  not 
have  been  the  work  of  the  good  God ;  and  since  the  God  of 
the  Jews  claimed  the  work  of  creation  as  his  own,  that  he 
must  be  a  being  different  from,  and,  according  to  many 
systems,  hostile  to,  the  Supreme  God.  Thus  the  authority 
of  the  Old  Testament  was  rejected.  Further,  those  who 
held  these  views  found  it  impossible  to  believe  that  the 
Saviour  could  have  assumed  a  material  body,  and  so  they 
were  led  to  maintain  that  in  His  earthly  life  He  was  only 
in  appearance  like  other  men.  Again,  they  could  not  believe 
that  the  existence  of  matter  would  be  prolonged  beyond  the 
present  life,  and  so  they  rejected  the  doctrine  of  the  resur 
rection  of  the  body.  And  as  they  conceived  that  perfection 
was  to  be  attained  through  release  from  the  dominion  of 
matter,  they  inculcated  an  ascetic  mode  of  life,  abstinence 
from  animal  food  and  from  wine,  as  well  as  from  marriage, 
through  which  the  material  life  is  perpetuated.  Now  it  is 
not  merely  that  the  fourth  Evangelist  gives  no  countenance 
to  any  of  these  theories,  but  he  shows  no  sign  that  he  had 
ever  heard  of  them.  He  is  an  unsuspicious  monotheist,  and 
the  theory  of  two  independent  principles  is  one  that  it  as 
little  occurs  to  him  to  refute  as  to  hold.  He  is  an  equally 


XVI. J        THE  GOSPEL  A  WORK  OF  THE  FIRST  CENTURY.  283 

unsuspicious  believer  in  the  Divine  authority  of  the  Old  Tes 
tament.  I  have  given  some  proofs  of  this  (p.  207),  but  what 
is  chiefly  important  to  observe  is,  that  while  the  Evangelist 
feels  the  controversy  with  Judaism  pressing,  the  controversy 
with  Gnosticism  does  not  exist  for  him.  He  is  solicitous  to 
maintain  that  Jesus  was  '  He  of  whom  .Moses  in  the  law, 
and  the  prophets  did  write;'  and  he  seems  to  have  no  idea 
that  our  Lord's  claims  could  have  been  set  on  any  other 
foundation.  No  question  as  to  the  lawfulness  of  marriage 
is  raised;  but  Jesus  is  represented  as  gracing  a  wedding  feast 
with  his  presence.  Controversies  as  to  the  use  of  animal 
food  and  as  to  the  ascetic  life,  though  known  to  St.  Paul 
(Rom.  xiv.  2  ;  i  Cor.  vii. ;  i  Tim.  iv.  3),  do  not  appear  to 
have  been  raised  in  the  circle  for  which  the  fourth  Evan 
gelist  wrote.  The  resurrection  of  the  body  is  plainly  taught 
(v.  28);  for  the  future  life  is  not  represented  as  resulting 
from  the  continuance  of  the  soul,  though  separated  from  the 
body ;  but  '  they  that  are  in  the  grave  shall  hear  the  voice 
•of  the  Son  of  Man,  and  shall  come  forth.'  Yet  he  is  so  little 
solicitous  to  maintain  the  doctrine  controversially,  that,  as  I 
have  already  mentioned  (p.  210),  there  have  been  those  who 
have  imagined  that  he  has  no  other  idea  of  eternal  life  than  of 
that  the  possession  of  which  is  present.  Jesus  is  represented 
as  having  a  body  subject  to  the  accidents  of  weariness  and 
thirst,  and  which  even  after  His  resurrection  His  disciples 
might  handle  (John  xx.  27 ;  i  John  i.  i).  Yet  in  the  Gospel  the 
Evangelist  shows  little  anxiety  to  combat  a  Docetic  theory 
-of  our  Lord's  person,  and  tells  without  scruple  some  things 
which  might  seem  to  favour  such  a  theory,  as,  for  example, 
the  appearance  of  our  Lord  to  His  disciples  when  the  doors 
were  shut.  But  it  would  seem  that  when  the  Epistle  was 
written  Docetism  had  become  formidable  enough  to  need 
express  condemnation  ;  and  then  the  denial  that  Jesus  Christ 
was  come  in  the  flesh  was  pronounced  to  emanate  from  the 
spirit  of  antichrist  (i  John  iv.  3  ;  2  John  7).  In  sum,  then, 
the  fourth  Evangelist  proves  himself  not  to  be  a  second 
century  writer,  by  his  utter  want  of  interest  in  the  contro 
versies  which  stirred  the  Christian  Church  early  in  the 
second  century. 


284  THE   JOHANNINE   BOOKS.  [XVI. 

IV.  I  regard  it,  then,  as  proved  that  the  writer  of  the 
fourth  Gospel  was  a  Jew,  not  very  distant  in  time  from  the 
events  which  he  relates.  Is  there,  then,  any  reason  why  we 
should  refuse  credence  to  the  claim,  which  he  himself  makes 
four  times,  to  have  been  an  eyewitness  of  our  Saviour's  life  ? 
(i.  14,  xix.  35,  xxi.  24  ;  i  John  i.  i).  There  is  nothing  against 
admitting  this  claim,  but  everything  in  favour  of  it.  It  is 
quite  remarkable  how  frequently  the  Evangelist  throws  him 
self  into  the  position  of  the  original  disciples,  and  repeats 
their  reflections  or  comments ;  these  being  such  as,  though 
appropriate  at  the  time,  would  not  be  likely  to  have  occurred 
to  one  who  was  not  himself  a  disciple.  There  are  three 
instances  in  the  very  second  chapter.  The  effect  of  trie- 
miracle  of  the  turning  the  water  into  wine  is  said  to  have 
been  that  His  'disciples  believed  on  Him'  (v.  u).  Again, 
'  His  disciples  remembered  that  it  was  written,  The  zeal  of 
Thine  house  hath  eaten  me  up'  (v.  17).  Again,  '  when  there 
fore  He  was  risen  from  the  dead,  His  disciples  remembered 
that  he  had  said  this  unto  them,  and  they  believed  the  Scrip 
ture  and  the  word  which  Jesus  had  said'  (v.  22).  Why  is 
this  prominence  given  to  the  reflections  of  the  disciples  ? 
Is  it  likely  that  a  forger  of  the  second  century,  who  wished 
to  exhibit  the  glory  of  the  Logos,  would  say,  what  sounds  SO' 
like  a  truism,  that  His  disciples  believed  on  Him  ?  If  they 
had  not,  they  would  not  have  been  disciples.  It  would  surely 
have  been  more  to  the  point  to  tell  the  effect  upon  the 
guests :  and  a  forger  would  hardly  have  failed  to  do  this. 
But  all  is  explained  when  we  suppose  that  a  disciple  is 
speaking,  and  recording  how  that  favourable  impression 
produced  by  the  testimony  of  the  Baptist,  which  had  dis 
posed  him  to  join  the  company  of  Jesus,  was  changed  by 
this  miracle  into  actual  faith.  I  leave  other  instances  of  the 
same  kind  to  be  traced  out  by  yourselves,  only  taking  notice 
now  of  one  of  them  :  how  we  are  told  that  the  disciples  who 
took  part  in  the  triumphal  entry  of  Palm  Sunday  understood 
not  at  the  time  what  they  had  been  doing,  but,  after  Jesus 
was  glorified,  '  remembered  that  these  things  were  written  of 
Him,  and  that  they  had  done  these  things  unto  Him '  (xii.  1 6).* 

*  It  harmonizes  curiously  with  this  remark  that  Mark  (xi.  i)  and  Luke 


XVI.]        THE  EVANGELIST  A  DISCIPLE  OF  THE  BAPTIST.  285 

I  think  we  may  also  conclude  that  the  writer  had  been  a 
•disciple  of  the  Baptist  as  well  as  of  our  Lord.     This  appears 
from  the  fulness  of  the  opening  chapter,  which  deals  with 
the   Baptist's  ministry,  and  which   is  best  explained  if  we 
suppose  the  Evangelist  to  be   the   unnamed  disciple  who, 
together  with   Andrew,  heard   the   testimony,  '  Behold   the 
Lamb  of  God.'     And  if  the  Evangelist  had  heard  the  story 
from  another  he  would  scarcely  have  added  the  minute  detail 
that  it  was  the  tenth  hour  of  the  day  when  the  conversation 
with  Jesus  took  place.     We  trace  the  work  of  a  disciple  of 
the  Baptist  in  more  than  one  subsequent  allusion  to  that 
testimony,  and,  above   all,   in   one  remarkable   periphrasis, 
which  is  undoubtedly  what  no  forger  would  have  imagined, 
*  Jesus  went  away  beyond  Jordan  into  the  place  where  John 
at  first  baptized,  and  there  He  abode;  and  many  resorted  unto 
Him  and  said,  John  did  no  miracle,  but  all  things  that  John 
spake  of  this  man  were  true'  (x.  41).     To  describe  the  place 
of  Jesus'  sojourn  as  the  place  where  John  at  first  baptized, 
and  to  record  the  impressions  of  those  who  had  been  affected 
by  the  Baptist's  teaching,  and  were  hesitating  whether  or 
not  they  should  attach  themselves  to  Jesus,  would  not  natu 
rally  occur  to  anyone  who  had  not  himself  moved  in  the  same 
circle.     Indeed,  the  prominence  given  to  the  Baptist  in  the 
fourth  Gospel  is  in  itself  a  proof  how  near  the  writer  was  to 
the   events   which    he   records.      A  modern  reader   seldom 
realizes  the  importance  of  the  work  done  by  the  Baptist  in 
preparing  the  way  of  Jesus.     Yet  the  Synoptic  Gospels  tell  of 
the  reputation  and  influence  gained  by  John  (Matt.  xiv.  5, 
Mark  vi.  20,  Luke  xx.  6;  cp.  Acts  xviii.  25,  xix.  3).     They 
tell  also  that  there  was  such  a  connexion  between  John  and 
his  successor,  that  any  who  acknowledged  the  divine  mission 
of  the  Baptist  would  be  bound  in  consistency  to  own  the 
authority  of  Jesus  (Matt.  xxi.  25,  Mark  xi.  31,  Luke  xx.  5). 
The  fourth  Gospel  explains  fully  what  the  connexion  was, 
by  telling  that  it  was  among  the  disciples  of  the  Baptist  that 

(xix.  29)  relate  our  Lord's  triumphal  entry  without  noting  that  it  was  a 
fulfilment  of  prophecy ;  whence  we  may  probably  infer,  that  if  these  two 
Evangelists  used  an  earlier  document,  it  too  contained  no  reference  to  the 
prophet  Zechariah.  It  is  Matthew  who  first  appeals  to  the  prophecy 
(xxi.  4). 


286  THE   JOHANNINE    BOOKS.  [XVI. 

Jesus  first  gained  followers,  who  joined  Him  in  consequence 
of  the  testimony  borne  to  Him  by  John.  This  testimony  is 
again  referred  to  as  furnishing  part  of  the  credentials  of  Jesus 
(v-  32>  33)-  But  we  have  no  reason  to  think  that  in  the 
second  century  John  occupied  such  a  place  in  the  minds  of 
men  as  would  lead  a  forger  to  lay  such  stress  on  his  authority. 
Other  notes  of  autoptic  testimony  are  the  minute  particulars 
of  time,  and  place,  and  persons,  that  are  mentioned ;  that  such 
a  discourse  took  place  in  Solomon's  porch  (x.  23);  such 
another  in  the  treasury  (viii.  20) ;  another,  as  I  mentioned  a 
moment  ago,  at  the  tenth  hour;  another  (that  with  the  woman 
of  Samaria)  at  the  sixth  (iv.  6) ;  that  such  another  miracle  was 
performed  at  the  seventh  hour  (iv.  52);  that  this  or  that  re 
mark  was  made,  not  by  the  disciples  generally,  but  by  Philip 
(vi.  7,  xiv.  8),  or  Andrew  (vi.  9),  or  Thomas  (xi.  16,  xiv.  5),  or 
Judas,  not  Iscariot  (xiv.  22).  The  name  of  the  servant  whose 
ear  Peter  cut  off  is  given  (xviii.  10).  In  two  different  places 
the  native  town  of  Peter  and  Andrew  is  mentioned  as  Beth- 
saida  (i.  44.,  xii.  21) :  the  Synoptic  Gospels  would  rather  have 
led  us  to  conjecture  Capernaum. 

There  is  one  passage  in  particular  which  by  its  graphic 
character  forcibly  impresses  me  with  the  conviction  that  I 
read  the  testimony  of  an  eyewitness:  I  mean  the  account 
(xx.  3)  of  the  conduct  of  Peter  and  an  unnamed  disciple  (who 
is  unmistakeably  the  Evangelist  himself),  when  Mary  Magda 
lene  came  running  to  tell  them  that  the  body  of  our  Lord  had 
been  removed  from  the  sepulchre  ;  how  the  younger  was  fore 
most  in  the  race,  but  contented  himself  with  looking  into  the 
sepulchre ;  how  Peter,  with  characteristic  boldness,  went  in,, 
and  how  the  other  disciple  then  followed  the  example  set  him. 
If  any  but  an  eyewitness  devised  all  these  details,  so  minute 
and  so  natural,  we  must  credit  him  with  a  literary  skill  such 
as  we  nowhere  else  find  employed  in  the  manufacture  of  Apo 
cryphal  Gospels.  But  there  remains  to  be  mentioned  a  touch 
so  subtle,  that  I  find  it  impossible  to  ascribe  it  to  a  forger's 
invention.  Not  a  word  is  said  as  to  the  effect  of  what  he  had 
seen  on  the  mind  of  Peter ;  but  we  are  told  that  the  other 
disciple  '  went  in,  and  saw,  and  believed  :  for  as  yet  they  had 
not  known  the  Scripture,  that  Christ  must  rise  again  from  the 


XVI.]  JOHN   THE   ELDER.  287 

dead.'  Is  it  not  plain  that  the  writer  is  relating  his  own 
experience,  and  recalling  how  it  was  that  the  idea  of  the 
Resurrection  opened  on  his  mind  as  a  reality  ?  And  lastly, 
note  that  we  have  here  the  work  of  no  reckless  forger.  To 
such  an  one  it  would  cost  nothing  to  record  that  he  and  Peter 
had  then  seen  our  Lord.  But  no ;  the  disciples  are  merely 
said  to  have  returned  to  their  own  home.  It  is  Mary  Mag 
dalene  who  remains  behind  and  first  enjoys  the  sight  of  the 
risen  Saviour. 

V.  If  it  has  been  proved  that  the  author  of  the  fourth 
Gospel  was  an  eyewitness,  little  time  need  be  spent  on  the 
proof  that  he  was  the  Apostle  John ;  for  few  would  care  to 
dispute  this,  if  forced  to  concede  that  the  Evangelist  actually 
witnessed  what  he  related.  To  accept  him  as  an  eyewitness 
implies  an  admission  that  the  things  he  tells  are  not  mere 
inventions  :  and  some  of  these  things  could  only  have  been 
known  to  one  of  the  inner  circle  of  disciples  who  surrounded 
our  Lord.  The  Evangelist  tells  what  these  disciples  said  to 
one  another  (iv.  33,  xi.  16,  xvi.  17,  xx.  25,  xxi.  3,  7)  ;  what 
they  thought  (ii.  u,  17,  23,  iv.  27,  xiii.  22,  29);  what  places 
they  were  accustomed  to  resort  to  (xi.  54,  xviii.  2,  xx.  19). 
The  epilogue  to  the  Gospel  (xxi.  24)  identifies  its  author  with 
him  whom  it  describes  as  'the  disciple  whom  Jesus  loved;' 
and  even  if  there  had  not  been  this  explicit  declaration,  the 
way  in  which  that  disciple  is  introduced  (xiii.  23,  xix.  26, 
xx.  2,  xxi.  7,  20,  and  probably  xviii.  15)  irresistibly  conveys 
the  impression  that  the  Evangelist  wished  his  readers  to 
understand  that  he  himself  was  that  disciple.  The  disciple 
whom  Jesus  loved  must  surely  have  been  one  of  those  three 
(Peter,  James,  and  John),  who  in  the  Synoptic  Gospels  are 
represented  as  honoured  by  our  Lord's  special  intimacy  ;  and 
in  this  Gospel  that  disciple  is  expressly  distinguished  from 
Peter  (xiii.  24 ;  xx.  2  ;  xxi.  7,  20),  while  we  know  that  James 
was  dead  long  before  the  fourth  Gospel  was  written  (Acts 
xii.  2). 

There  is,  however,  one  writer  whose  claims  to  the  compo 
sition  of  the  Gospel  must  be  carefully  considered,  namely,  one 
of  the  most  shadowy  personages  in  ecclesiastical  history,  John 
the  Elder.  A  whole  school  of  critics  speak  of  him  with  as 


288  THE   JOHANNINE    BOOKS.  [XVI. 

assured  confidence  as  if  he  were  a  person  concerning  whose 
acts  we  had  as  much  information  as  concerning  those  of  Julius 
Caesar;  but  in  truth  his  very  existence  seems  to  have  been 
first  discovered  by  Eusebius,  and  it  is  still  a  disputed  matter 
whether  the  discovery  be  a  real  one.  I  have  already  quoted 
(p.  91)  the  passage  of  Papias's  preface,  from  which  Eusebius 
drew  his  inference.  In  naming  the  'elders/  whose  traditions 
he  had  made  it  his  business  to  collect,  having  mentioned 
Andrew,  Peter,  Philip,  Thomas  and  James,  John  and  Mat 
thew,  Papias  adds  immediately  afterwards  the  names  of 
Aristion  and  John  the  Elder.  Eusebius  inferred  from  the 
double  mention  of  the  name  that  two  Johns  are  spoken  of: 
the  first,  who  is  coupled  with  Matthew,  being  clearly  the 
Evangelist ;  the  second,  who  is  described  as  the  *  elder,'  and 
whose  name  is  placed  after  that  of  Aristion,  being  a  different 
person.  Eusebius  had  learned  from  Dionysius  of  Alexandria 
(see  p.  232)  to  recognize  the  possibility  that  there  might  have 
been  more  Johns  than  one  ;  yet  it  must  be  observed  that 
Dionysius  himself  had  failed  to  notice  that  Papias  had  given 
any  countenance  to  his  suggestion.  Irenaeus  also  (see  p.  92) 
seems  to  be  ignorant  of  this  second  John,  who  is  equally 
unrecognized  by  the  great  majority  of  later  ecclesiastical 
writers. 

It  would  be  important  if  we  could  exactly  know  what  Papias 
meant  by  calling  the  second  John  'the  elder.'  It  can  scarcely 
mean  only  that  he  held  the  office  of  presbyter  in  the  Church  ; 
for  then  Papias  would  not  have  used  the  definite  article  as  he 
does,  not  only  here  in  the  preface,  but  afterwards,  when  he 
cites  a  saying  of  this  John  with  the  formula,  '  This  also  the 
elder  said '  (p.  92).  But  Papias  had  used  the  phrase  'the 
elders,'  as  we  might  use  the  phrase  '  the  fathers,'  in  speaking 
of  the  venerated  heads  of  the  Church  in  a  former  generation. 
And  since  he  gives  this  title  to  John,  and  withholds  it  from 
Aristion,  it  does  not  appear  that  we  can  lay  any  stress  on  the 
remark  of  Eusebius,  that  he  places  Aristion's  name  first. 
Further,  this  very  title  '  elders  '  is  given  by  Papias  to  Andrew, 
Peter,  and  the  rest  whom  he  first  enumerates,  and  therefore  he 
cannot  be  supposed,  in  giving  this  title  the  second  time  to 
John,  to  intend  to  place  him  in  a  different  category  from  those 


XVI.]  JOHN   THE    ELDER.  289 

in  his  first  list.  The  only  fact,  then,  which  remains  for  us  to 
build  on  is,  that  Papias  in  his  preface  names  John  twice  over; 
but  whether  this  is  a  mere  slovenliness  of  composition,  or 
whether  he  really  means  to  speak  of  two  Johns,  is  a  matter  on 
which  it  seems  to  me  rash  to  speak  positively,  on  such  scanty 
knowledge  as  we  have  of  Papias's  work.  It  may  be  assumed 
that  none  of  the  subsequent  passages  in  that  work  where  John 
is  mentioned  speaks  decisively  on  the  present  question,  else 
Eusebius  would  have  quoted  it. 

But  though  we  cannot  accept  the  existence  of  the  second 
John  as  a  proved  fact,  we  may  at  least  receive  it  as  an  admis 
sible  hypothesis,  and  may  examine  whether  it  enables  us  to 
give  a  better  account  of  the  Johannine  writings.  Judging 
merely  by  the  diction,  we  could  easily  believe  that  the  author 
of  the  Apocalypse  was  different  from  the  author  of  the  other 
books  ;  so  that  if  we  reject  the  notion  of  Eusebius,  that  John 
the  Elder,  not  John  the  Apostle,  was  the  author  of  the  former, 
we  must  still  inquire  whether  we  can  invert  the  relation  :  Did 
John  the  Apostle  write  the  Apocalypse,  and  John  the  Elder 
the  Gospel  ?  But. here  we  are  inconveniently  pressed  by  the 
results  we  have  just  obtained,  namely,  that  he  who  wrote  the 
Gospel  must  have  been  an  eyewitness  and  a  close  companion 
of  our  Lord.  If  this  were  not  the  Apostle,  there  must  have 
been  in  our  Lord's  company  one  of  whom  the  Synoptic  Evan 
gelists  have  told  us  nothing,  and  he  no  ordinary  disciple,  but 
the  disciple  whom  Jesus  loved,  and  who  at  the  Last  Supper 
reclined  on  the  bosom  of  our  Lord.  Further,  the  name  of  this 
disciple  was  John,  and  here  we  have  the  additional  difficulty 
that  (as  remarked,  p.  63)  the  fourth  Gospel  gives  no  inti 
mation  of  the  intercourse  of  our  Lord  with  any  John  but  the 
Baptist.  We  can  easily  acquiesce  in  the  suggestion  that  the 
Evangelist  thought  it  needless  to  name  himself:  but  if  there 
was  in  our  Lord's  company  a  second  John  holding  one  of  the 
highest  places  among  His  disciples,  is  it  possible  that  the 
Evangelist  could  pass  over  him  also  in  silence  ? 

It  follows,  then,  irresistibly,  that  if  the  writer  of  the  fourth 
Gospel  was  not  John  the  Apostle,  he  at  least  wished  to  be 
taken  for  him,  and  desired  that  his  readers  should  think  of 
no  one  else.  Let  us  see,  then,  how  the  hypothesis  works, 

u 


2QO  THE   JOHANNINE    BOOKS.  [XVI. 

that  the  Gospel  was  written  by  a  disciple  of  John,  who 
wished  to  sink  his  own  personality,  and  to  present  the  tra 
ditions  he  had  gathered  from  his  master's  teaching,  together 
with  some  modifications  of  his  own,  in  such  a  form  that  they 
might  be  taken  for  the  work  of  John  himself.  But  this  hypo 
thesis  will  not  bear  to  be  burdened  with  the  addition  that  the 
recording  disciple  was  John  the  Elder ;  for  his  is  a  person 
ality  which  refuses  to  be  suppressed.  If  this  were  'John  the 
Elder,'  whose  traditions  Papias  set  himself  to  collect,  he 
must  have  been  a  notable  person  in  the  Church  of  Asia,  and 
we  can  hardly  help  identifying  him  with  the  John  who  is  said 
to  have  lived  to  the  reign  of  Trajan,  and  to  have  been  the 
teacher  of  Polycarp  and  other  early  Asiatic  bishops.*'  At  all 
events,  we  cannot  help  identifying  him  with  the  author  of  the 
Second  and  Third  Epistles,  who  designates  himself  as  '  the 
elder.'  These  Epistles  are  recognized  by  Irenaeus  and  by 
Clement  of  Alexandria  (see  p.  211).  Their  brevity  and  the 
comparative  unimportance  of  their  matter  caused  them  to  be 
looked  on  with  some  suspicion.  Origen  tells  of  some  who 
did  not  regard  them  as  genuinef  (Euseb.  vi.  25);  and  they 
are  not  included  in  the  Peshitto  Syriac.J  Jerome  was  dis 
posed  to  ascribe  them  not  to  John  the  Apostle  but  John  the 
Elder  (De  Viris  Illust.  9).  Other  proofs  may  be  given  of  re- 


*  Ecclesiastical  tradition  speaks  so  constantly  only  of  one  John  in  Asia, 
that  Scholten,  Keim,  and  others  have  rid  themselves  of  the  double  John 
by  denying  that  the  Apostle  John  was  ever  in  Asia  ;  but  the  arguments 
they  offer  in  support  of  their  paradox  are  so  weak  that  I  have  not  thought 
it  worth  while  to  discuss  them. 

f  Origen' s  immediate  object  apparently  would  lead  him  to  present  the 
least  favourable  view  of  disputed  books.  He  is  deprecating  the  multipli 
cation  of  books,  and  with  that  object  remarking  how  small  is  the  number 
of  books  of  Scripture.  Compared  with  all  the  Churches  '  from  Jerusalem 
round  about  unto  Illyricum,'  to  which  Paul  fully  preached  the  Gospel 
(Rom.  xv.  19),  how  small  is  the  number  of  Churches  to  which  he  wrote 
Epistles,  and  these  but  short  ones !  Peter  has  left  only  one  undisputed 
Epistle :  there  may  be  a  second,  but  that  is  controverted.  John  owns 
(xxi.  25)  how  many  of  the  deeds  of  Christ  he  has  of  necessity  left  unrecorded ; 
and  (Rev.  x.  4)  that  in  his  Apocalypse  he  had  not  been  permitted  to  write 
all  that  he  had  heard.  He  has  left  also  a  very  short  Epistle.  There  may 
be  likewise  a  second  and  a  third,  for  the  genuineness  is  not  universally 
acknowledged  ;  but  in  any  case  they  do  not  make  up  100  0-Tt'xot  in  all. 
(Origen,  In  Joann.  v.,  Prsef.  1-4,  pp.  94-96,  Philocal.  ch.  5). 

J  Ephraem  Syrus  quotes  3  John  4.     (De  Tim.  Dei  Opp.  Gr.  I.  76  F.) 


XVI.]  THE    THIRD    EPISTLE.  29 1 

luctance,  on  the  part  of  those  who  recognized  them,  to  set 
them  on  a  level  with  the  First  Epistle. 

I  believe  that  these  hesitations  arose  from  the  fact  that 
these  Epistles  were  not  included  in  the  public  reading  of  the 
early  Church — a  thing  intelligible  enough  from  the  private 
nature  of  their  contents.  The  antiquity  of  the  letters  is  un 
doubted,  and  they  are  evidently  precious  relics  of  a  vene 
rated  teacher  carefully  preserved  by  the  Asiatic  Church ;  but 
to  those  who  were  ignorant  of  their  history  they  appeared  to 
stand  on  a  different  level  from  the  documents  sanctioned  by 
the  public  use  of  the  Church.  If  the  external  evidence  leaves 
any  room  for  doubt  about  the  two  minor  letters,  internal  evi 
dence  removes  it ;  for  the  hypothesis  of  forgery  will  not  stand 
examination.  A  forger  would  surely  inscribe  his  composition 
with  some  well-known  name ;  he  would  never  have  referred 
the  authorship  to  so  enigmatical  a  personage  as  '  the  elder.' 
But,  above  all,  the  contents  of  the  Third  Epistle  exclude  the 
supposition  of  forgery,  for  which  indeed  no  conceivable 
motive  is  apparent.  The  writer  represents  (v.  u)  that  he 
had  sent  a  letter  to  a  Church,  but  that  his  messengers,  in 
stead  of  being  received  with  the  hospitality  which  was  the 
invariable  rule*  of  the  Christian  societies,  were  absolutely 
rejected.  The  man  who  claimed  to  take  the  leading  part 
in  the  government  of  the  Church  not  only  failed  to  receive 
them  himself,  but,  under  pain  of  excommunication,  forbade 
anyone  else  to  do  so.  This  is  clearly  a  case  not  of  in- 
hospitality,  but  of  breach  of  communion.  The  bearers  of 
*  the  elder's '  letter  are  treated  precisely  as  he  himself  had 
directed  that  heretical  teachers  should  be  treated.  '  If  there 


*  See  Rom.  xii.  13;  Heb.  xiii.  2;  i  Peter  iv.  9  ;  I  Tim.iii.  2,  v.  10; 
Tit.  i.  8  ;  and  compare  Acts  xvi.  15,  xvii.  5,  xxi.  8,  16,  Rom.  xvi.  23.  We 
learn  from  the  newly- discovered  'Teaching  of  the  Twelve  Apostles'  that  it 
was  found  necessary  in  the  early  Church  to  make  regulations  in  order  to 
prevent  the  readiness  of  Christians  to  entertain  strangers  from  being  traded 
on  by  idle  persons,  who  tried  to  make  the  pretence  of  preaching  the 
Gospel  a  means  of  living  without  working.  «  Let  every  Apostle  who  comes 
to  you  be  received  as  the  Lord.  But  he  shall  only  stay  a  single  day,  but 
if  need  be  another  day  also.  But  if  he  stays  three  days  he  is  a  false  pro 
phet.  Let  the  Apostle  when  he  leaves  you  take  nothing  but  bread  enough 
to  last  till  he  reaches  his  quarters  for  the  night.  But  if  he  asks  for  money 
he  is  a  false  prophet'  (ch.  xi.). 

U  2 


2Q2  THE   JOHANNINE   BOOKS.  [XVI. 

come  any  unto  you,  and  bring  not  this  doctrine,  receive 
him  not  into  your  house,  neither  bid  him  God  speed :  for 
he  that  biddeth  him  God  speed  is  partaker  of  his  evil  deeds ' 
(2  John  10,  n).  We  may  well  believe  (since  we  know  the 
fact  from  the  Epistle  to  the  Corinthians)  that  schisms  and 
dissensions  existed  even  in  Apostolic  times ;  but  this  was  a 
state  of  things  a  forger  was  not  likely  to  invent  or  even  to 
recognize.  It  is  certain,  then,  that  these  two  letters  are  no 
forgeries,  but  genuine  relics  of  some  great  Church  ruler,  pre 
served  after  the  circumstances  which  had  drawn  them  forth 
were  forgotten.  And  if  ever  the  argument  from  identity  of 
style  and  matter  can  be  relied  on,  it  is  certain  also  that 
tradition  has  rightly  handed  down  the  belief  that  the  writer 
was  no  other  than  the  author  of  the  First  Epistle  and  the 
Gospel. 

If  this  identity  be  established,  it  follows  at  once  that  that 
author  is  no  unknown  person  who  hides  his  personality  under 
the  cover  of  a  great  name.  He  comes  forward  in  his  own 
person,  claiming  great  authority,  sending  his  legates  to  an 
old  established  Church,  and  treating  resistance  to  his  claims 
on  the  part  of  the  rulers  of  such  Churches  as  idle  prating 
(<£Avapetv),  which  he  is  confident  that  by  his  presence  he  will 
at  once  put  down.  And,  according  to  all  appearance,  his 
anticipations  prove  correct,  and  his  rule  over  the  Churches 
of  Asia  is  completely  acquiesced  in.  When  such  a  man  pub 
lishes  a  Gospel  containing  a  clearly  implied  claim  on  the  part 
of  the  writer  to  be  '  the  disciple  whom  Jesus  loved,'  I  cannot 
suppose  the  claim  to  be  made  on  behalf  of  someone  else, 
but  must  regard  it  as  exhibiting  the  grounds  of  the  authority 
which  the  writer  himself  exercised.  And  no  account  of  the 
matter  seems  satisfactory  but  the  traditional  one,  that  the 
writer  was  the  Apostle  John. 

To  the  historical  inquirer,  then,  the  minor  Epistles  of  St. 
John,  being  not  impersonal  like  the  First  Epistle,  have  an 
importance  quite  out  of  proportion  to  their  length.  And 
though  the  light  they  cast  on  the  writer's  surroundings  be 
but  that  of  a  lightning  flash,  enabling  us  to  get  a  momentary 
sight  of  a  position  of  which  we  have  no  knowledge  as  regards 
its  antecedents  or  consequents,  yet  enough  is  revealed  in  that 


XVI.]  -THE   THIRD    EPISTLE.  293 

short  glimpse  to  assure  us  of  the  rank  the  writer  occupied, 
and  of  the  struggles  which  were  at  first  necessary  to  establish 
his  authority.  Everything  harmonizes  with  the  traditional 
account  that  John  came  late  in  life  to  Asia  Minor,  where 
he  must  have  found  Churches  of  Paul's  founding  long  estab 
lished.  There  is  nothing  incredible  in  the  statement  that 
leading  persons  in  such  Churches  at  first  resisted  the  autho 
rity,  not  of  John  himself,  but  of  emissaries  sent  by  him. 
The  authority  which  these  emissaries  claimed  may  have 
seemed  an  intrusion  on  the  legitimate  rule  possessed  by  the 
actual  governors  of  the  Church.  It  is  remarkable  that  John 
appears  to  have  found  the  form  of  government  by  a  single 
man  already  in  existence  ;  for  Diotrephes  singly  is  spoken  of 
as  excommunicating  those  who  disobeyed  his  prohibitions. 
Bishop  Lightfoot  is  disposed  (Philippians,  pp.  202,  206, 
7th  ed.)  to  attribute  a  principal  share  in  the  establishment 
of  episcopacy  to  the  action  of  John  in  Asia  Minor.  But  if 
the  view  here  taken  is  right,  John  did  not  bring  in  that  form 
of  government,  but  found  it  there ;  whether  it  was  that  Paul 
had  originally  so  constituted  the  Churches ;  or  that,  in  the 
natural  growth  of  things,  the  method  of  government  by  a 
single  man,  which  in  political  matters  was  the  rule  of  the 
Roman  Empire,  proved  to  be  also  the  most  congenial  to  the 
people  in  ecclesiastical  matters.  It  is  impossible  for  us  to  say 
whether  the  rejection  of  John's  legates  was  actuated  solely 
by  jealousy  of  foreign  intrusion,  or  whether  there  may  not 
also  have  been  doctrinal  differences.  Diotrephes  may  have 
been  tainted  by  that  Docetic  heresy  against  which  the  Apostle 
so  earnestly  struggled  (i  John  iv.  3,  2  John  7). 

Some  have  identified  the  hospitable  Caius  of  the  third 
Epistle  with  Paul's  host  at  Corinth  (Rom.  xvi.  23);*  but  no 
argument  can  be  built  on  the  recurrence  of  so  very  common 
a  name.  This  third  Epistle  professes  to  have  had  a  com 
panion  letter :  '  I  wrote  somewhat  to  the  Church,'  says  the 
writer  (v.  9);  Zypaij/d  ri,  which  seems  to  imply  some  short 
composition.  I  believe  that  we  have  that  letter  still  in  the 

*  Pseud.  Athanas.,  Synops.  Sac.  Script.,  cb.  76  (Athan.  t.  ii.  p.  202, 
Ed.  Bened.) 


294  THE   JOHANNINE   BOOKS.  [XVI. 

companion  Epistle  which  has  actually  reached  us.  By  those 
who  understand  the  inscription  as  denoting  an  individual  it 
has  been  variously  translated  :  whether  as  in  our  version,  *  to 
the  elect  Lady,'  or  '  to  the  elect  Kyria,'  or  to  the  '  lady 
Electa.'  I  do  not  delay  to  discuss  these  renderings,  because 
I  believe  that  it  is  a  Church,  not  an  individual,  which  is  de 
scribed  (v.  i)  as  known  and  loved  by  all  who  know  the  truth, 
of  which  it  is  told  that  some  of  her  children  walk  in  the  truth 
(v.  4),  to  which  the  precept  of  mutual  love  is  addressed  (v.  5), 
and  which  possessed  an  elect  sister  in  the  city  whence  the 
letter  was  written  (v.  13).  We  are  not  called  on  to  explain 
why  this  mode  of  addressing  a  Church  should  have  been 
adopted ;  but  we  can  account  for  it  if  we  accept  Kenan's 
conjecture  (see  p.  255)  that  Peter  on  his  last  visit  to  Rome 
had  been  accompanied  by  John,  who,  after  Peter's  martyr 
dom,  escaped  to  Asia  Minor.  Certain  it  is  that  these  two 
Apostles  appear  to  have  had  very  close  relations  with  each 
other  (Acts  iii.  i,  viii.  14,  John  xiii.  24,  xviii.  15,  xx.  2,  xxi.  7); 
that  the  Evangelist  shows  himself  acquainted  with  Peter's 
martyrdom  (xxi.  19);  while  the  Apocalypse  exhibit  marks  of 
the  impression  made  on  the  writer  by  the  cruelties  of  the 
Neronian  persecution.  If,  as  I  believe,  Peter's  Epistle  was 
written  from  Rome,  and  if  John  was  with  Peter  when  he 
wrote  it,  it  would  be  natural  that  the  words  of  that  letter 
should  stamp  themselves  on  his  memory ;  and  I  have  noted 
(see  p.  236)  some  coincidences  between  Peter's  Epistle  and 
the  Johannine  writings.  It  would  then  be  only  a  reproduc 
tion  of  the  phrase  fj  ev  Ba/5vXwvt  crweKAeKT^  (i  Peter  v.  13), 
if  John  applies  the  title  e/cXe/cTry  to  the  two  sister  Churches 
of  Asia  Minor ;  while  again  his  description  of  himself  as  the 
elder  would  be  suggested  by  6  crv/xTrpeo-^vrepos  (i  Peter  v.  i). 

What  I  have  said  about  the  Second  Epistle  is  in  a  great 
measure  conjectural ;  but  I  wish  you  to  observe  that  the  un 
certainty  which  attaches  to  all  conjectures  does  not  affect  the 
inferences  which  I  have  drawn  from  the  Third  Epistle,  and 
which  I  count  as  of  great  importance.  At  the  present  day 
Baur  has  more  faithful  disciples  in  Holland  than  in  Germany. 
A  typical  representation  of  the  form  which  Baur's  theories 
take  among  his  disciples  of  the  present  day  is  to  be  found  in 


XVI.]  THE   THIRD   EPISTLE.  295 

a  book  called  the  '  Bible  for  Young  People,'  of  which  the 
New  Testament  part  is  written  by  a  Dr.  Hooykaas,  and  of 
which  an  English  translation  was  published  a  few  years  ago. 
In  this  book  the  disciple  whom  Jesus  loved  is  volatilized 
away.*  We  are  taught  that  the  last  chapter  of  the  fourth 
Gospel  is  intended  only  to  give  a  symbolical  revelation  of 
certain  passages  of  old  Church  history.  If  it  is  said  that  the 
disciple  whom  Jesus  loved  is  to  remain  when  Peter  passes 
away,  this  only  means  that  the  authority  of  Peter,  whose 
supremacy  over  the  Apostolic  communities  is  not  disputed, 
was  only  to  last  during  his  life,  whereas  the  disciple  who 
read  into  the  soul  of  Jesus  will  retain  his  influence  till  the 
perfecting  of  the  kingdom  of  God.  Who  is  meant  by  this 
disciple  is  not  clear.  The  author  is  greatly  tempted  to  think 
of  Paul,  but  can  find  nothing  to  countenance  this  conjecture; 
so  he  has  to  be  satisfied  with  setting  him  down  as  an  ideal 
personage.  In  the  presence  of  such  attempts  to  turn  the 
Gospel  narrative  into  allegory,  we  have  cause  for  gratitude 
that  the  short  letter  to  Caius  has  been  preserved  to  us.  It 
matters  little  that  we  are  ignorant  of  the  circumstances  that 
drew  it  forth,  and  that  Diotrephes  and  Demetrius  are  to  us 
little  more  than  names.  But  we  see  clearly  that  the  letter 
contains  solid  facts  which  cannot  be  allegorized,  and  that 
the  writer  is  no  abstraction,  but  a  man  busy  with  active  work 
and  engaged  in  real  contests,  one  who  claimed  the  superin 
tendence  of  distant  Churches,  and  who  vigorously  asserted 
his  authority  against  those  who  refused  obedience.  I  have 
looked  for  other  solutions,  but  can  acquiesce  in  none,  save 
that  he  is  the  Apostle  John. 

*  The  notion  that  the  disciple  whom  Jesus  loved  is  not  to  be  identified 
with  the  Apostle  John,  but  is  only  an  ideal  personage,  originated,  as  far  as 
I  know,  with  another  Dutch  divine,  Scholten.  See  '  Der  Apostel  Johannes 
in  Kleinasien'  (Berlin,  1872),  p.  no. 


296  THE   JOHANNINE    BOOKS. 


XVII. 

PART    VI. 

THE    FOURTH    GOSPEL   AND    THE   SYNOPTICS. 

THERE  is  one  class  of  objections  to  the  Johannine  author 
ship  of  the  fourth  Gospel  which  I  might  decline  to  discuss, 
as  being  outside  the  limits  I  have  assigned  myself  in  this 
course  of  lectures  :  I  mean  objections  founded  on  real  or 
apparent  contradictions  between  the  fourth  and  the  Synoptic 
Gospels.  For  this  is  an  argument  which  the  objectors,  on 
their  own  principles,  have  no  right  to  urge.  They  do  not 
believe  that  the  writers  of  New  Testament  books  were  aided 
by  any  supernatural  assistance,  and  therefore  they  have  no 
right  to  demand  from  them  more  minute  exactness  of  detail 
than  other  writers  exhibit  under  similar  circumstances.  Now, 
we  feel  lively  interest  when  a  veteran  statesman  or  soldier 
gives  us  his  recollections  of  stirring  events  in  which  in  his 
younger  days  he  had  taken  part.  But  when  such  recollec 
tions  are  published,  and  compared  with  records  made  at  an 
earlier  date,  it  is  the  commonest  experience  in  the  world  to 
find  discrepancies,  and  these  sometimes  in  particulars  by  no 
means  unimportant.  Yet  we  simply  conclude  that  on  these 
points  the  old  man's  memory  may  have  played  him  false,  and 
are  not  tempted  to  doubt  the  genuineness  of  the  book  which 
purports  to  be  his  memoirs.  If,  then,  we  have  found  reason 
to  believe  that  the  fourth  Gospel  contains  an  aged  Apostle's 
recollections  of  the  life  of  the  Master  whom  he  had  loved,  we 
should  have  no  reason  to  give  up  that  belief,  even  if  we  were 
unable  to  refute  the  allegation  that  these  recollections  are  in 
some  points  at  variance  with  earlier  records.  It  would  be 
possible  to  grant  that  the  later  account  in  some  points  needed 
correction,  while  yet  we  might  believe  the  picture  it  presents 
of  the  life  and  work  of  our  Lord  to  be,  on  the  whole,  one  of 
the  highest  interest  and  value.  But,  though  for  the  sole  pur 
pose  of  an  inquiry  as  to  the  authorship  of  the  fourth  Gospel,. 


XVII.]         THE    OMISSIONS    OF    THE    FOURTH    GOSPEL.  297 

we  might  set  aside  as  irrelevant  a  great  deal  of  what  has  been 
said  as  to  contradictions  between  this  Gospel  and  its  prede 
cessors  ;  yet  so  many  of  these  alleged  contradictions  melt 
away  on  examination,  that  I  think  it  well  to  give  some  little 
discussion  to  a  subject  important  from  other  points  of  view. 

A  very  important  question  to  be  settled  in  using  the  fourth 
Gospel  is,  What  verdict  are  we  to  think  the  Evangelist  means 
to  pass  on  those  things  which  are  related  in  the  Synoptic 
Gospels,  but  omitted  in  his  ?  It  is  notorious  that  the  things 
recorded  in  this  Gospel  are,  for  the  most  part,  different  from 
those  related  by  the  other  Evangelists,  so  that  it  may  be 
regarded  as  exceptional  when  St.  John  goes  over  ground 
which  they  have  traversed.  Among  the  things  omitted  by 
St.  John  are  some  of  the  most  important  events  of  our  Lord's 
life.  Thus,  the  institution  of  the  rite  of  the  Lord's  Supper 
finds  no  place  in  his  account  of  the  night  before  the  Passion, 
nor  does  he  mention  the  Agony  in  the  Garden.  Now  Renan, 
and  a  host  of  Rationalist  critics  with  him,  in  using  St.  John's 
Gospel,  go  on  the  principle  that  he  is  to  be  understood  as 
bearing  testimony  against  whatever  he  does  not  relate ;  that 
we  are  to  assume  that  he  either  had  never  heard  of  the  things 
which  he  passes  over  in  silence,  or  else  means  to  imply  that 
they  never  occurred.  There  is  no  better  instance  on  which 
to  test  Renan's  principle  than  that  to  which  he  confidently 
applies  it  in  the  opening  sentence  of  his  Life  of  Jesus,  l  Jesus 
was  born  at  Nazareth,  a  little  town  of  Galilee.'  When  we 
inquire  on  what  authority  Renan  has  ventured  on  this  cor 
rection  of  the  traditional  account  of  our  Lord's  birthplace,  we 
find  his  main  reliance  is  on  the  fact  that  John  '  knows  nothing' 
of  the  journey  to  Bethlehem;  that  'for  him  Jesus  is  simply  of 
Nazareth  or  of  Galilee,  on  two  occasions  when  it  would  have 
been  of  the  highest  importance  to  make  mention  of  the  birth 
at  Bethlehem.'*  Now,  if  you  have  not  read  your  Bible  with 
care  it  may  surprise  you  to  learn  that  it  is  quite  true  (as  De 
Wette  before  Renan  had  pointed  out)  that  not  only  does  St. 
John's  Gospel  contain  no  assertion  of  the  birth  at  Bethlehem 
or  of  the  descent  from  David,  but  it  reports  more  than  one 

*   Vie  de  Jesus,  p.  22. 


298  THE   JOHANNINE   BOOKS.  [XVII. 

uncontradicted  assertion  of  the  opposite.  In  the  first  chapter 
(vv.  45,  46)  Philip  tells  Nathanael,  '  We  have  found  him,  of 
whom  Moses  in  the  law,  and  the  prophets  did  write,  Jesus  of 
Nazareth,  the  son  of  Joseph,'  to  which  Nathanael  answers, 
'  Can  there  any  good  thing  come  out  of  Nazareth  ? '  an  objec 
tion  to  which  Philip  makes  no  direct  reply.  Again,  in  the 
7th  chapter  (vv.  41,  42)  we  are  told  of  the  difficulty  which  the 
birth  of  Jesus  put  in  the  way  of  His  reception  :  *  Others  said, 
This  is  the  Christ.  But  some  said,  Shall  Christ  come  out  of 
Galilee  ?  Hath  not  the  Scripture  said,  that  Christ  cometh  of 
the  seed  of  David,  and  out  of  the  town  of  Bethlehem,  where 
David  was  ?  '  No  answer  is  given  to  these  difficulties  ;  nor, 
again,  are  we  told  that  Nicodemus  had  any  reply  to  make 
when  his  brother  members  of  the  Sanhedrim  exclaimed,  on  his 
taking  our  Lord's  part,  '  Art  thou  also  of  Galilee?  Search,  and 
look  :  for  out  of  Galilee  ariseth  no  prophet'  (vii.  52).  Thus 
St.  John  tells  us  expressly  that  there  were  current  objections 
to  the  acknowledgment  of  our  Lord's  claims,  which  ran  thus  : 
'  Jesus  is  not  of  David's  seed,  as  it  was  foretold  the  Messiah 
should  be.  Jesus  was  born  at  Nazareth,  but  the  prophet  fore 
told  that  the  Messiah  should  be  bom  at  Bethlehem  ;  there 
fore  Jesus  is  not  the  Messiah  of  whom  the  prophets  spoke.' 
And  the  Evangelist  does  not  give  the  slightest  hint  how  these 
difficulties  are  to  be  got  over. 

There  are  two  ways  of  explaining  his  silence  :  one  is  that 
he  did  not  know  what  answer  to  give  to  these  objections ; 
the  other,  that  he  knew  his  readers  did  not  require  any  answer 
to  be  given.  If  it  were  not  that  the  first  is  the  explanation 
adopted  by  Renan,  I  should  have  thought  it  too  absurd  to 
need  serious  refutation.  It  is  certain  that  the  Evangelist 
believed  that  Jesus  was  the  Messiah,  and  also  that  he  believed 
in  the  Old  Testament.  How  is  it  possible  that  he  could  take 
pleasure  in  bringing  out  the  fact  that  the  Jews  held  that  there 
was  a  contradiction  between  acknowledging  the  Messiahship 
of  Jesus,  and  acknowledging  the  truth  of  the  Old  Testament 
prophecies,  unless  he  had  in  his  own  mind  some  way  of  re 
conciling  this  alleged  contradiction  ?  And  since  critics  of  all 
schools  hold  that  John's  Gospel  was  written  at  so  late  a  date 
that  the  Synoptic  accounts  of  our  Lord's  birth  at  Bethlehem, 


XVII.]      ST.  JOHN   WRITES   FOR   INSTRUCTED   READERS.        299 

of  the  seed  of  David,  must  then  have  been  many  years  in 
circulation,  and  have  had  time  to  become  the  general  belief 
of  Christians,  it  is  ridiculous  to  think  that  John  had  any  way 
of  answering  the  Jewish  objection  different  from  that  which 
must  have  occurred  to  all  his  readers. 

We  can  well  believe  that  John  would  not  have  cared  to 
repeat  the  objection  if  he  knew  no  answer  to  it ;  but  it  is  easy 
to  understand  why,  knowing  the  answer,  he  did  not  trouble 
himself  to  state  it  formally.  When  we  repeat  the  story  of  a 
blunder  committed  by  ignorant  persons,  we  do  not  think  it 
necessary  to  demonstrate  their  error  if  we  are  addressing 
persons  who  understand  the  subject.  For  example,  a  very 
worthy  man,  some  fifty  years  ago,  declaiming  against  the 
necessity  of  human  learning  in  an  ambassador  of  Christ, 
-exclaimed,  '  Greek,  indeed  !  I  should  like  to  know  if  St.  Paul 
knew  Greek.'  In  repeating  such  a  story  to  educated  persons, 
we  leave  it  to  speak  for  itself.  We  do  not  think  it  necessary 
to  expand  into  formal  argument  the  statement  that  St.  Paul 
did  know  Greek,  and  that  the  fact  that  he  wrote  Epistles  in 
that  language  is  one  of  the  reasons  why  it  is  desirable  that 
persons  should  learn  it  whose  duty  it  will  be  to  expound  these 
Epistles.  Every  disputant  is  pleased  to  find  his  opponent 
relying  on  an  argument  which  he  is  sure  he  can  in  a  moment 
demolish.  And  so  every  Christian  reader  of  St.  John's  Gospel 
has  read  with  a  certain  satisfaction  and  triumph  how  the 
Jews  would  have  been  willing  to  acknowledge  the  Messiah- 
ship  of  Jesus,  only  for  this,  that  it  was  necessary  the  Messiah 
should  be  born  at  Bethlehem,  and  be  of  the  seed  of  David. 
We  are  all  ready  with  the  answer,  'Why,  so  Jesus  was.'  And 
now  we  are  asked  to  believe  that  the  Evangelist  did  not 
sympathize  with  his  readers  in  this  matter;  that  he  wrote  in 
perplexity  what  they  read  in  triumph.  A  critic  who  can  so 
interpret  the  Gospel  commands  admiration  for  his  ingenuity 
in  contriving  to  go  wrong  on  a  point  which  scarcely  any 
previous  reader  had  been  able  to  misunderstand. 

I  should  not  have  cared  to  spend  so  many  words  on  this 
matter,  if  it  were  not  that  the  study  of  this  example  calls 
attention  to  some  peculiarities  of  the  Evangelist's  style,  and 
also  throws  some  light  on  the  question  whether  the  fourth 


300  THE   JOHANNINE   BOOKS. 

Evangelist  had  seen  the  preceding  Gospels.  I  ask  you,  then,, 
in  the  first  place,  to  observe  that  no  writer  is  more  in  the 
habit  than  St.  John  of  trusting  to  the  previous  knowledge  of 
his  readers  :  and  it  is  not  strange  that  he  should  ;  for  at  the 
late  period  when  he  wrote,  he  was  not  addressing  men  to 
whom  Christianity  was  a  novelty,  but  men  to  whom  the  facts 
of  the  history  were  already  known.  In  the  very  first  chapter 
(v.  40)  he  describes  Andrew  as  Simon  Peter's  brother,  taking 
for  granted  that  Simon  Peter*  was  known.  A  reference  to  the 
Baptist  (iii.  24)  is  accompanied  by  the  parenthetical  remark, 
*  for  John  was  not  yet  cast  into  prison,'  evidently  intended  for 
men  who  knew  that  John's  career  had  been  thus  cut  short, 
but  who  needed  the  explanation  that  the  events  which  the 
Evangelist  is  relating  occurred  while  the  Baptist  was  still  in 
activity.  He  does  not  directly  tell  of  the  appointment  of  the 
twelve  Apostles,  but  he  assumes  it  as  known  (vi.  70),  *  Have 
not  I  chosen  you  twelve,  and  one  of  you  is  a  devil  ?  *  His 
narrative  does  not  inform  us  that  Joseph  was  the  reputed 
father  of  our  Lord,  but  this  appears  incidentally  when  the 
Jews  ask,  'Is  not  this  Jesus  the  son  of  Joseph,  whose  father 
and  mother  we  know?'  (vi.  42  :  see  also  i.  45).  The  Baptism 
of  our  Lord  is  not  expressly  mentioned,  but  is  implied  in 
the  account  the  Baptist  gives  of  his  having  seen  the  Spirit 
descending  on  him  (i.  32).  The  Ascension  is  not  related,  but 
it  is  thrice  referred  to  (iii.  13,  vi.  62,  xx.  17).  As  a  general 
rule  this  Evangelist  prefers  to  leave  unspoken  what  he  can 
trust  his  readers  to  supply.  He  does  not  claim  to  be  the  un 
named  disciple  who  heard  the  testimony  of  John  the  Baptist 
(i.  40),  nor  to  be  the  unnamed  disciple  through  whose  interest 
Peter  was  admitted  to  the  high-priest's  palace  (xviii.  16) ;  yet 
there  can  be  little  doubt  that  in  both  cases  the  impression 
received  by  most  readers  is  that  which  the  writer  intended 
to  convey.  I  have  already  (p.  63)  noted  the  most  striking 
example  of  this  writer's  'ignorance,'  that  he  'knows  nothing' 
of  the  Apostle  John  ;  yet  few  dispute  that  if  he  were  not  that 
Apostle  himself,  he  was  one  who  desired  to  pass  for  him. 

*  It  may  be  mentioned  that  John  (i.  43)  gives  Peter  the  name  Cephas, 
which  is  not  found  in  the  Synoptic  Gospels,  but  is  recognized  by  St.  Paul 
(i  Cor.  i.  12,  iii.  22,  ix.  5,  xv.  5  ;  Gal.  ii.  9). 


XVII.]  THE    IRONY   OF   ST.  JOHN.  301 

This  Evangelist  repeatedly  brings  the  knowledge  which  he 
assumes  to  be  shared  with  him  by  his  readers  into  contrast 
with  the  ignorance  of  the  actors  in  the  events  he  relates. 
Hobbes  explained  laughter  as  arising  from  a  sudden  conceit 
of  our  own  superiority  to  someone  else  ;  and  though  it  may  be 
•doubted  whether  this  gives  a  sufficient  account  of  all  our 
mirthful  emotions,  it  is  certain  that  it  is  by  exciting  this  con 
ceit  of  superiority  that  literary  artists  have  produced  some 
of  their  most  telling  effects.  Even  a  child  is  pleased  when 
he  can  boast  to  his  fellows  that  he  knows  something  which 
they  do  not ;  and  this  is  a  kind  of  pleasure  through  which, 
when  they  can  give  it  to  their  spectators,  dramatic  authors 
have  found  the  surest  way  to  win  applause.  No  scenes  are 
more  effective  than  when  the  character  on  the  stage  is  repre 
sented  as  ignorant  of  something  known  to  the  spectators,  and 
in  his  ignorance  using  expressions  which  have  a  reference  the 
speaker  does  not  dream  of.  The  staple  of  most  comedies  is 
that  someone  on  the  stage  is  deceived,  or  is  under  a  misap 
prehension,  while  the  spectators  are  in  the  secret ;  and  their 
pleasure  is  all  the  greater  the  more  convinced  the  deceived 
person  is  that  he  knows  everything.  Thus  the  duped  father 
in  Terence  believes  that  he  is  the  only  wise  man  of  the 
family — 

Primus  sentio  mala  nostra ;  primus  rescisco  omnia, 
Primus  porro  obnuntio  : 

but  the  slave  presently  puts  the  feelings  of  the  spectators  into 
words — 

Rideo  mine  ;  se  primum  ait  scire,  is  solus  nescit  omnia. 

The  effect  of  tragedy  is  equally  heightened  when  a  personage 
is  represented  as  ignorant  of  his  real  position.  In  the  CEdipus 
Rex*  of  Sophocles  much  of  the  tragic  effect  is  derived  from 
the  king's  unconsciousness  that  he  is  himself  the  object  of 

*  Much  of  what  is  said  here  I  have  said  elsewhere  in  a  Paper  contained 
in  a  volume  of  sermons  now  out  of  print,  called  '  The  Irony  of  St.  John  ; ' 
the  title  of  which,  as  well  as  its  use  of  the  word  'irony,'  were  borrowed 
from  Bishop  Thirlwall's  celebrated  Essay  on  'The  Irony  of  Sophocles' 
(Philological  Museum,  ii.  483). 


302  THE   JOHANNINE    BOOKS.  [XVII. 

the  wrath  of  heaven ;  while,  as  the  spectators  hear  him  de 
nounce  the  author  of  the  city's  calamities,  they  are  thrilled 
by  the  knowledge  that  it  is  on  himself  he  is  imprecating 
vengeance. 

Touches  of  the  same  kind  are  as  effective  in  historical 
narrative  as  in  the  drama.  Every  reader  remembers  the  effect 
of  Isaac's  question,  when  bearing  the  fuel  for  Abraham's 
sacrifice  :  '  My  father,  behold  the  fire  and  the  wood,  but  where 
is  the  lamb  for  the  burnt  offering  ? '  In  one  touch  the  con 
trast  is  brought  out  between  the  boy's  ignorance  and  the 
father's  and  the  reader's  knowledge  that  he  is  himself  the 
destined  victim.  If  the  ending  of  the  story  were  not  happy, 
nothing  could  have  a  more  tragic  effect  than  this  simple 
question.  To  the  same  principle  is  due  the  effectiveness  of 
another  Scripture  story,  Nathan's  parable,  by  which  David's 
indignation  against  tyrannical  injustice  is  raised  to  the 
highest  point  before  he  knows  that  he  is  himself  the  culprit 
on  whom  he  pronounces  sentence. 

Now  passages  of  the  character  I  have  described  occur  to 
an  unusual  amount  in  St.  John's  Gospel.  I  believe  that  in 
that  Gospel  can  be  found  as  many  cases  as  in  all  the  rest  of 
the  New  Testament  where  the  characters  are  introduced  as 
speaking  under  misapprehensions  which  the  reader  knows 
how  to  correct.  Sometimes  the  Evangelist  himself  tells  how 
their  mistakes  are  to  be  corrected,  as  where  the  Jews  say 
(ii.  20),  *  Forty  and  six  years  was  this  temple  in  building, 
and  wilt  Thou  rear  it  up  in  three  days  ? '  the  Evangelist  adds 
'  but  He  spake  of  the  temple  of  His  body.'  But  in  the 
majority  of  cases  no  explanation  is  given.  A  few  verses 
before  one  of  the  passages  relied  on  by  Renan,  the  Jews  ask 
(vii.  35,  36),  'Whither  will  He  go  that  we  shall  not  find  Him  ? 
Will  He  go  unto  the  dispersed  among  the  Gentiles  and  teach 
the  Gentiles  ?  What  manner  of  saying  is  this  that  He  said, 
Ye  shall  seek  Me,  and  shall  not  find  Me:  and  where  I  am, 
thither  ye  cannot  come  ?'  But  no  explanation  is  given  of  the 
true  answer  to  this  question.  Nicodemus  asks  (iii.  4),  '  How 
can  a  man  be  born  when  he  is  old  ?  Can  he  enter  the  second 
time  into  his  mother's  womb  and  be  born?'  Yet  the  meaning 
of  the  answer  made  him  would  be  unintelligible  to  one  not 


XVII.]  ST.  JOHN    KNEW   OF   PREVIOUS    GOSPELS.  305 

already  impregnated  with  Christian  ideas.  The  woman  of 
Samaria  misunderstands  our  Lord's  saying  when  she  says 
(iv.  15),  'Sir,  give  me  this  water  that  I  thirst  not,  neither 
come  hither  to  draw;'  yet  the  Evangelist  passes  on  without 
remark.  And  so,  in  like  manner,  when  the  Jews  ask, 
'  How  can  this  man  give  us  his  flesh  to  eat  ?'  (vi.  52).  But 
the  most  striking  examples  of  the  introduction  of  characters 
speaking  truths  of  which  they  have  themselves  no  conscious 
ness,  are  that  of  Caiaphas  (xi.  50),  declaring  that  it  was 
1  expedient  that  one  man  should  die  for  the  people;'  and 
that  of  Pilate  (xix.  21),  insisting,  in  spite  of  the  chief  priests* 
remonstrance,  in  inscribing  on  the  title  on  the  cross,  not 
that  our  Lord  said  He  was  the  King  of  the  Jews,  but  that  He 
was  the  King  of  the  Jews. 

I  have  given  proof  more  than  sufficient  to  show  that  no 
writer  is  more  in  the  habit  than  St.  John  of  trusting  to  his 
reader's  previous  knowledge,  and  that  no  one  understands 
better  the  rhetorical  effect  of  leaving  an  absurdity  without 
formal  refutation,  when  his  readers  can  be  trusted  to  perceive 
it  for  themselves.  For  the  secret  of  an  orator's  success  is  if 
he  can  contrive  that  his  hearers'  minds  shall  not  be  passive, 
but  shall  be  working  with  him,  and  even  running  before 
him  to  the  conclusions  which  he  wishes  them  to  draw.  It  is 
to  me  amazing  that  Renan,  who  professes  to  value  this  Gospel 
so  highly,  should  never  have  discovered  this  characteristic  of 
its  style,  but  should  treat  the  book  as  if  he  had  to  do  with 
an  author  like  Euclid,  who  is  careful  to  guard  matter-of-fact 
readers  from  misapprehension  by  appending  quod  est  absur- 
dum  to  the  conclusions  which  he  does  not  wish  them  to 
believe.  It  would  not  have  been  worth  while  to  make  so 
much  comment  on  Kenan's  want  of  literary  tact  in  misunder 
standing  St.  John's  statements  about  our  Lord's  birthplace,  if 
this  had  been  an  isolated  piece  of  stupidity ;  but  full  discus 
sion  was  necessary,  because  if  Renan  is  wrong  in  this  case  it 
is  because  he  proceeds  by  a  faulty  method,  which  misleads 
him  equally  whenever  he  has  to  deal  with  incidents  omitted 
by  St.  John. 

From  the  facts  that  have  been  stated  I  draw  the  further 
inference  that,  at  the  time  when  St.  John  wrote,  he  knew 


THE   JOHANNINE    BOOKS.  [XVII. 

that  other  Gospels  had  been  written.  The  thing  is  in  itself 
likely.  We  may  gather  from  the  last  chapter  that  it,  at  least, 
was  not  written  until  after  the  death  of  Peter.  It  is  true  that 
this  last  chapter  has  been  imagined  to  be  the  work  of  another 
hand,  but  I  know  no  good  reason  for  thinking  so.  It  is  not 
a  good  reason  that  the  Gospel  has  seemed  to  come  to  an  end 
in  the  preceding  chapter  ;  for  there  is  nothing  strange  in  an 
author's  adding  a  postscript  to  his  work,  whether  before 
publication  or  in  a  second  edition.*  There  is  no  external 
evidence  of  any  kind  to  induce  us  to  separate  the  authorship 
of  the  last  chapter  from  that  of  the  rest,  and  there  is  com 
plete  identity  of  style.  It  is  not  only  those  who  have  been 
nicknamed  '  apologists '  who  defend  the  genuineness  of  this 
chapter.  Hilgenfeld,  for  instance  (Einleitung,  p.  719),  notices 
the  mention  of  the  Sea  of  Tiberias,  Thomas  called  Didymus, 
Nathanael  of  Cana  of  Galilee,  and  the  disciple  whom  Jesus 
loved  ;  and  I  would  add  that  the  reference  in  v.  20  to  the  pre 
ceding  history  is  quite  in  St.  John's  manner  (see  vii.  50,  xi.  2, 
xviii.  14,  xix.  39).  Hilgenfeld  also  points  out  the  resem 
blance  of  the  phrases  d>s  OLTTO  Trrjx&v  Sia/cocrtW,  V.  8,  with  a>s 
OLTTO  crraScW  Se/axTreVre  (xi.  18);  of  the  bread  and  fish  (6\}/dpiov 
Kal  aproi/),  v.  9,  with  the  same  words  (vi.  1 1),  the  word  6\j/dpiov 
being,  in  the  N.  T.,  peculiar  to  St.  John;  and  the  6  /xaprvpwv 
Trept  TOVTWV,  v.  24,  with  i.  34,  xix.  35.  And  I  think  there  is  a 
wonderful  trait  of  genuineness  in  the  words  (v.  22),  '  If  I  will 
that  he  tarry  till  I  come,  what  is  that  to  thee?'  The  great 
age  of  the  Apostle  had  seemed  to  justify  the  interpretation 
which  some  disciples  had  put  on  these  words,  viz.  '  that  that 
disciple  should  not  die.'  The  Evangelist  evidently  accepts 
it  as  a  possibility  that  this  may  be  the  true  interpretation  of 
them,  but  he  contents  himself  with  recording  what  the  words 
of  Jesus  actually  were,  and  pointing  out  that  they  do  not 
necessarily  bear  this  meaning.  I  do  not  believe  that  a  forger 
of  the  next  century  could  have  given  such  a  picture  of  the 
old  age  of  the  beloved  disciple,  looking  and  longing  for  the 
reappearance  of  his  Master,  thinking  it  possible  that  he  might 


*  Quite  similar  phenomena  present  themselves  in  the  conclusion  of  the 
Epistle  to  the  Romans. 


XVII.]  ST.  JOHN   KNEW   OF   PREVIOUS   GOSPELS.  305 

live  to  see  it,  yet  correcting  the  belief  of  his  too  eager  fol 
lowers  that  he  had  any  guaranteed  promise  that  he  should. 
Now,  if  this  2ist  chapter  be  an  integral  part*  of  the  Gos 
pel,  John  must  have  written  after  the  death  of  Peter ;  but  at 
that  late  period  other  Gospels  had  been  written,  and  John 
did  not  live  so  completely  out  of  the  Christian  world  as  not 
to  be  likely  to  have  seen  them.  But  what  to  my  mind  proves 
decisively  that  he  had  is  the  fact  that  he  can  venture  to  state 
most  formidable  objections  to  the  Messiahship  of  Jesus  with 
out  giving  a  word  of  refutation.  If  Christians  were  then 
dependent  on  traditional  rumour  for  the  belief  that  Jesus  was 
born  at  Bethlehem,  that  He  was  of  the  seed  of  David,  that 
Joseph  was  not  his  real  father,  I  cannot  believe  that  John 
would  have  refrained  from  giving  his  attestation  to  the  truth 
of  these  beliefs,  or  have  left  his  readers  without  his  assurance 
that  the  answer  they  might  be  expected  to  give  to  the  Jewish 
objectors  was  the  right  one.  The  fact,  then,  that  John  felt 

*  It  has  been  attempted  to  separate  the  last  two  verses  from  the  rest,  and 
to  ascribe  them  to  John's  disciples.  But  with  regard  to  *  We  know  that 
his  testimony  is  true  '  (v.  24),  Renan  owns  that  very  nearly  the  same  words 
occur  again  in  3  John  12  (where,  however,  oTSos  seems  the  true  reading) ; 
and  he  might  have  added  that  they  have  a  close  parallel  in  John  xix.  35. 
oV8a/j.€i>  is  a  favourite  Johannine  word,  occurring  five  times  in  the  six  verses 
I  John  v.  15-20. 

Renan  states  ( Vie  de  Jesus,  p.  535)  that  v.  25  is  wanting  in  the  Sinaitic 
MS. ;  but  this  is  a  slip  of  memory.  What  Renan  had  in  his  mind  was  that 
Tischendorf  had  expressed  his  opinion  that  this  verse  was  in  a  different 
hand  from  the  rest.  He  thought  that  the  scribe,  whom  he  calls  A,  who 
wrote  the  rest  of  the  Gospel,  had  stopped  at  the  end  of  v.  24,  and  that 
•v.  25,  with  the  subscription,  was  added  by  the  corrector,  whom  he  calls  D, 
and  who,  he  believes,  was  also  one  of  the  transcribers  of  this  and  of  the 
Vatican  MS.  If  this  were  so,  it  would  be  probable  that  v.  25  had  been 
wanting  in  the  archetype  of  the  Sinaitic,  and  had  been  added  by  the 
corrector  from  a  different  source. 

But  Tregelles  did  not  share  Tischendorfs  opinion  as  to  there  being  a 
difference  of  handwriting  ;  and  Dr.  Gwynn  has  noted  that  the  same  indica 
tions,  whence  Tischendorf  infers  (see  p.  160)  that  the  scribe  D  wrote  the 
conclusion  of  St.  Mark,  prove  that  he  did  not  write  the  conclusion  of  St. 
John.  Contrary  to  the  practice  of  that  scribe,  the  name  'Icadvvijs  is  written 
in  the  subscription  here  with  two  j/'s  ;  and  the  final '  arabesque, '  as  Tischen 
dorf  calls  it,  or  ornament  drawn  with  a  pen  between  the  last  line  and  the 
subscription,  is  exactly  of  the  same  pattern  as  that  found  in  the  other  books 
written  by  the  scribe  A,  and  is  quite  different  from  the  four  written  by  the 
scribe  D,  viz.  Tobit  and  Judith,  St.  Mark  and  I  Thess.  (the  last  leaf  in 
each  of  these  two  N.  T.  books,  having  been  cancelled  and  rewritten  by  D). 
There  is,  therefore,  no  ground  to  imagine  that  -v.  25  is  in  any  way  dis 
credited  by  the  testimony  of  the  Sinaitic  MS. 

X 


306  THE   JOHANNINE    BOOKS.  [XVII. 

himself  called  on  to  give  no  answer  to  the  objection  that 
Christ  must,  according  to  the  prophets,  be  of  the  seed  of 
David,  and  of  the  town  of  Bethlehem,  appears  to  me  to  be  a 
proof  that  he  knew  that  his  readers  had  in  their  hands  at 
least  one  of  the  Gospels  which  contain  the  genealogy  tracing 
our  Lord's  descent  from  David,  and  which  relate  the  birth  at 
Bethlehem. 

I  draw  the  same  inference  from  the  supplemental  character 
of  St.  John's  Gospel.  As  I  think  that  mere  accident  will  not 
account  for  the  likeness  to  each  other  of  the  Synoptic  Gos 
pels,  so  also  do  I  think  that  mere  accident  will  not  account 
for  the  unlikeness  of  St.  John's  to  the  others.  If  he  had 
written  an  account  of  our  Saviour's  life  without  any  know 
ledge  that  other  accounts  had  been  written,  it  is  incredible 
that  he  could  have  so  successfully  avoided  telling  what  is 
related  in  these  other  accounts.  It  is  exceptional  if  we  find 
in  St.  John  anything  that  had  been  recorded  by  his  prede 
cessors  ;  and  when  we  do,  there  is  usually  some  obvious 
reason  for  its  insertion.  Thus  the  miracle  of  feeding  the 
five  thousand  is  used  by  St.  John  to  introduce  a  discourse 
peculiar  to  his  Gospel.  The  true  explanation,  I  am  per 
suaded,  is  that  which  has  commonly  been  given,  viz.  that 
this  Evangelist,  knowing  what  accounts  Christians  already 
had  in  their  hands,  wrote  his  Gospel  with  the  intention  of 
supplementing  these  previous  accounts.  When  he  omits 
what  his  predecessors  had  related,  he  is  not  to  be  supposed 
to  discredit  them,  or  to  wish  to  contradict  them;  but  it  is  part 
of  his  plan  not  to  bear  testimony  to  what  had  been  sufficiently 
attested  already. 

That  St.  John's  silence  is  neither  the  silence  of  ignorance 
nor  of  disparagement  becomes  still  plainer  when  we  examine 
each  instance  severally.  Thus  he  does  not  relate  the  institu 
tion  of  the  Eucharistic  Feast ;  and  Renan  takes  this  omission 
as  a  proof  that  our  Lord  did  not  then  institute  the  rite,  a 
conclusion  in  which  Strauss  on  other  grounds  agrees.  And 
certainly  for  anyone  who  does  not  acknowledge  our  Lord's 
Divinity,  it  is  an  important  thing  to  overthrow,  if  possible, 
the  Synoptic  account  of  this  part  of  the  history.  For  see 
what  is  involved  in  the  acceptance  of  this  account.  That 


XVII.]       EVIDENTIAL  IMPORTANCE   OF  THE  EUCHARIST.        307 

Jesus  should  on  this  night  have  spoken  of  his  approaching 
death  Strauss  believes  to  be  possible  enough.      He  thinks 
that  he  must  have  seen  what  feeble  support  followers,  who 
understood   him   but   imperfectly,    were    capable   of  giving 
against  relentless  foes.      His   idea  is   that  when  Jesus,  as 
master  of  the  household,  broke  the  bread,  and  poured  out  the 
wine,  for  distribution  among  his  disciples,  the  thought  may 
have  involuntarily  presented  itself  to  him  that  even  so  would 
his  body  soon  be  broken,  even  so  his  blood  soon  be  poured 
forth,  and  that  he  may  have  expressed  some  such  gloomy 
forebodings  to  his  disciples.     But  if  we  grant,  what  Strauss 
admits  to  be  possible,  that  Jesus,  looking  on  his  death  as  a 
sacrifice,  may  have  regarded  his  blood  as  the  consecration  of 
a  new  covenant  between  God  and  mankind,  and  that  in  order 
to  give  a  living  centre  to  the  community  which  he  desired  to 
found,  he  may  have  commanded  the  perpetual  repetition  of 
this  distribution  of  bread  and  wine,  we  are  led  to  views  of 
our  Saviour  which  can  hardly  fall  short  of  those  held  by  the 
Church.   At  the  moment  when  our  Lord  sees  that  death  can  be 
no  longer  escaped,  and  that  the  career  which  he  had  planned 
has  ended  in  failure,  he  calmly  looks  forward  to  the  forma 
tion  of  a  new  society  which  shall  own  him  as  its  founder. 
He  foresees  that  the  flock  of  timorous  followers,  whose  dis 
persion  on  the  next  day  he  ventures  to  predict,  will  recover 
the  shock  of  their  disappointment  and  unite  again.     As  for 
the   shameful   death,  the  thoughts   of  which  oppress   him, 
instead  of  anticipating  that  his  followers  will  put  it  from 
their  thoughts,  and  blush  to  remember  their  credulity  when 
they  accepted  as  their  Saviour  one  unable  to  save  himself, 
he   commands  his  disciples  to  keep  that  death  in  perpetual 
memory.    Notwithstanding  the  apparent  failure  of  his  course, 
he  conceives  himself  to  be  a  unique  person  in  the  world's 
history ;  and,  in  Strauss's  words,  he  regards  his  death  as  the 
seal  of  a  new  covenant  between  God  and  mankind.     Further, 
he  makes  it  an  ordinance  of  perpetual  obligation  to  his  fol 
lowers  that  they  shall  seek  the  most  intimate  union  with  his 
body  and  blood,  and  holds  out  to  them  this  closeness  of 
perpetual  union  with  himself  as  the  source  of  all  spiritual 
life.      He  intimates  that  the  rite  then  being  enacted  was 

x  2 


308  THE   JOHANNINE    BOOKS.  [XVII. 

comparable  with  the  first  setting  apart  of  the  Jewish  nation 
to  be  God's  peculiar  people  ;  and  as  Moses  had  then  sprinkled 
the  people  with  blood,  saying,  '  Behold  the  blood  of  the 
covenant  which  the  Lord  hath  made  with  you '  (Ex.  xxiv.  8), 
so  now  he  calls  his  own  the  blood  of  the  new  covenant. 
This  legislation  for  a  future  Church  was  made  at  a  moment 
when  his  most  attached  disciples  could  not  be  trusted  to 
remain  with  him  for  an  hour,  and  when  he  had  himself  pre 
dicted  their  desertion  and  denial.  Surely,  in  the  establish 
ment  of  the  Christian  Church,  with  its  perpetual  Eucharistic 
celebrations,  we  have  the  fulfilment  of  a  prophecy,  such  as 
no  human  forecast  could  have  dreamed  of  at  the  time  the 
prophecy  was  uttered. 

The  case  I  have  been  considering  must  be  added  to  the 
proofs  given  above  (p.  217)  that  the  Synoptic  Gospels  repre 
sent  our  Lord  as  using,  concerning  His  own  claims,  no  less 
lofty  language  than  does  St.  John's.  For  what  mere  man 
has  dared  to  set  such  a  value  on  his  own  life  as  to  speak  of  it 
as  a  sacrifice  for  the  sins  of  the  world,  the  source  of  all  good 
to  mankind  ?  If  with  respect  to  the  institution  of  the  Eucha 
rist  St.  John  is  to  be  regarded  as  contradicting  the  account 
of  the  Synoptics,  we  must  inquire  which  account  is  the  more 
credible ;  and  then  we  have  to  consider  that  the  Synoptic 
account  is  not  only  the  earlier,  but  is  confirmed  by  the  per 
petual  practice  of  the  Church.  The  very  first  time  we  read 
of  Christian  communities  after  the  day  of  Pentecost  we  are 
told  of  their  '  breaking  of  bread  '  (Acts  ii.  42,  46) ;  and  if  we 
want  more  information  about  the  rite,  we  obtain  it  from  a 
document  earlier  than  either  the  Synoptic  Gospels  or  the 
Acts,  namely,  St.  Paul's  First  Epistle  to  the  Corinthians,  in 
which,  having  spoken  of  'eating  the  Lord's  Supper'  (xi.  20), 
he  goes  on  to  give  an  account  of  the  institution  of  the  rite, 
in  strict  agreement  with  that  in  St.  Luke's  Gospel.  How 
great  value  Christians,  from  the  earliest  times,  attached  to 
the  eating  Christ's  flesh  and  drinking  His  blood,  appears 
from  words  which  I  cite  without  scruple,  since  the  progress 
of  criticism  has  tended  to  dispel  the  doubts  once  entertained 
about  the  genuineness  of  the  Ignatian  epistles,  '  I  wish  for 
the  bread  of  God,  the  heavenly  bread,  the  bread  of  life,  which 


XVII.]        THE   EUCHARIST    RECOGNIZED    BY  ST.  JOHN.  309 

is  the  flesh  of  Jesus  Christ,  the  Son  of  God,  and  as  drink  I 
desire  His  blood,  which  is  love  incorruptible'  (Ignat.  Ep.  ad 
Rom.  7). 

But  now  comes  the  most  singular  part  of  the  discussion. 
So  far  is  it  from  being  the  case  that  such  language  must  be 
regarded  as  at  variance  with  a  Gospel  which  tells  nothing  of 
the  institution  of  the  Eucharist,  that  these  words  of  Ignatius, 
or,  if  you  will,  of  pseudo-Ignatius,  have  been  generally  ac 
cepted  as  evidence  that  the  writer  was  acquainted  with  St. 
John's  Gospel.  When  St.  John  wrote,  Eucharistic  celebra 
tions  were  prevailing  widely,  if  not  universally,  over  the 
Christian  world ;  and  many  years  before,  St.  Paul  had  told 
how  our  Lord  had  commended  the  rite  with  the  words,  '  This 
is  My  body,'  'this  is  My  blood.'  Renan  would  have  us  be 
lieve  that  St.  John  intended  by  his  silence  to  negative  that 
account,  yet  no  writer  has  done  so  much  to  strengthen  the 
belief  which  we  are  told  he  desired  to  oppose.  In  fact  one 
of  the  arguments  which  sceptical  writers  have  used  to  induce 
us  to  assign  a  late  date  to  the  fourth  Gospel  is  the  resem 
blance  of  the  language  of  the  sixth  chapter  to  the  Eucharistic 
language  of  the  writers  of  the  second  century.  They  say  that 
in  the  Synoptic  Gospels  the  Eucharist  is  but  a  memorial,  or 
that  at  most  there  is  a  reference  to  some  atoning  efficacy 
attached  to  the  Passion  of  Christ.  In  Justin  Martyr,  on  the 
other  hand,  the  Eucharist  is  a  means  by  which  spiritual 
nourishment  is  mystically  conveyed  to  the  soul.  He  speaks 
of  these  elements  as  no  longer  common  bread  and  wine,  and 
he  teaches  that  as  the  Divine  Logos  became  flesh  and  blood 
for  our  salvation,  so  our  flesh  and  blood,  by  partaking  of  this 
heavenly  nourishment,  enter  into  communion  with  a  higher 
spiritual  nature  (ApoL  i.  66).  This  is  evidently  the  same 
doctrine  as  that  taught  (John  vi.  55),  'My  flesh  is  meat  in 
deed,  and  My  blood  is  drink  indeed.  He  that  eateth  My 
flesh  and  drinketh  My  blood  dwelleth  in  Me  and  I  in  him.' 
And  in  Lecture  vi.  I  have  taken  pains  to  show  that  Justin 
derived  his  doctrine  from  St.  John. 

I  own  I  do  not  think  it  possible  satisfactorily  to  explain 
John  vi.  if  we  exclude  all  reference  to  the  Eucharist.  If  both 
the  Evangelist  knew  and  his  readers  knew  that  our  Lord  had 


310  THE   JOHANNINE    BOOKS.  [XVII. 

on  another  occasion  said,  '  Take,  eat,  this  is  My  body ;  drink 
this,  this  is  My  blood,'  they  could  hardly  help  being  reminded 
of  these  expressions  by  that  discourse  about  eating  His  flesh 
and  drinking  His  blood.  On  this  point  St.  John's  Gospel 
throws  light  on  the  Synoptic  account.  It  softens  the  apparent 
harshness  and  abruptness  of  these  words  at  the  Last  Supper, 
when  we  learn  that  this  language  about  eating  His  flesh  and 
drinking  His  blood  was  not  then  used  by  our  Lord  for  the 
first  time.  We  are  told  that  in  a  discourse  delivered  at  the 
Passover  season  of  the  preceding  year  (John  vi.  4),  our  Lord 
had  prepared  the  minds  of  His  disciples  to  receive  the  idea 
of  communion  with  Him  by  eating  His  flesh  and  drinking 
His  blood.  His  language,  then,  at  the  Last  Supper,  instead 
of  causing  perplexity  to  the  disciples,  would  remind  them  of 
the  discourse  spoken  at  the  preceding  Passover  season,  and 
would  remove  the  perplexity  caused  by  His  previous  dark 
sayings.  The  words,  *  Take,  eat,  this  is  My  body,'  would 
then  mean  to  them,  Hereby  can  you  do  that  which  perplexed 
you  when  I  spoke  of  it  before. 

In  any  case  there  can  be  no  doubt  of  the  fact  that  the 
discourse  recorded  in  John  vi.  has  had  the  effect  of  greatly 
increasing  the  value  attached  by  Christians  to  the  Eucharistic 
rite,  and  it  cannot  plausibly  be  maintained  that  this  effect 
was  one  which  the  narrator  neither  foresaw  nor  intended ; 
that  he  was  ignorant  of  this  ordinance  or  wished  to  disparage 
it.  And  if  the  result  of  the  previous  investigation  has  been 
to  establish  that  this  Evangelist  habitually  relies  on  the  pre 
vious  knowledge  of  his  readers,  we  cannot  doubt  that  in  this 
as  in  other  cases  he  speaks  words  ^>wvavra  crweTotcrtv ;  and 
that  he  gives  no  formal  account  of  the  institution  of  the 
Eucharist,  only  because  he  knew  that  his  readers  had  other 
accounts  of  it  in  their  hands. 

Very  nearly  the  same  things  may  be  said  about  St.  John's 
omission  of  our  Lord's  command  to  His  disciples  to  go  and 
baptize  all  nations.  If  by  his  silence  he  intended  to  dis 
parage  the  rite  of  baptism,  it  is  a  strange  accident  that  it  is 
words  of  his  which  caused  Christians  to  entertain  an  even 
exaggerated  sense  of  the  absolute  necessity  of  that  rite,  and 
which  suggested  the  name  dvayei/vr/o-is,  by  which  in  the  middle 


XVII.]       CAREFUL   COMPOSITION   OF   FOURTH    GOSPEL.  311 

of  the  second  century  baptism  was  generally  known  (Justin 
Martyr,  ApoL  i.  61,  with  an  express  reference  to  our  Lord's 
words  to  Nicodemus). 

And  so  likewise  as  to  the  Ascension.  Although  John  does 
not  formally  relate  it,  he  not  only  refers  to  it  in  two  texts 
already  quoted,  '  What  and  if  ye  shall  see  the  Son  of  Man 
ascend  up  where  He  was  before  ? J  (vi.  62) ;  '  Touch  Me  not, 
for  I  am  not  yet  ascended  to  My  Father'  (xx.  17);  but  he 
assumes  the  fact,  not  in  a  single  verse,  but  throughout  the 
Gospel.  The  Evangelist  is  never  weary  of  teaching  that 
Jesus  is  a  heavenly  person,  not  an  earthly;  His  true  home 
heaven,  not  earth.  The  doctrine  of  the  pre-existence  of 
Christ  is  made  to  smooth  away  all  difficulties  in  admitting 
the  fact  of  the  Ascension.  '  No  man  hath  ascended  up  to 
heaven  but  he  that  came  down  from  heaven,  even  the  Son 
of  Man  which  is  in  heaven.'  If,  then,  St.  John,  who  so 
frequently  declares  that  Jesus  had  been  in  heaven  before 
He  came  to  earth,  does  not  bear  formal  testimony  to  the 
fact  that  Jesus  returned  to  heaven  after  He  left  earth,  it 
can  only  be  that  he  was  aware  that  this  was  already  well 
known  to  his  readers  by  the  attestation  of  others.* 

I  think  it  needless  to  multiply  proofs  that  St.  John  did  not 
write  for  men  to  whom  the  story  of  our  Lord's  life  was  un 
known  ;  but  that,  on  the  contrary,  he  constantly  assumes  his 
readers'  knowledge  of  the  leading  facts.  Instead  of  taking 
it  as  our  rule  of  interpretation  that  he  contradicts  whatever 
he  does  not  report,  we  should  be  much  nearer  the  truth  if 
we  held  that  he  confirms  what  he  does  not  contradict.  And 
the  more  we  study  this  Gospel,  the  more  weight,  we  find, 
deserves  to  be  attached  to  the  Evangelist's  even  indirect 
indications  of  opinion.  The  Synoptic  Gospels  may  fairly 
be  described  as  artless  narratives  of  such  deeds  and  words 
of  Jesus  as  had  most  fastened  themselves  on  His  disciples' 
recollection ;  but  the  fourth  Gospel  is  avowedly  written  with 
a  purpose,  namely, '  that  ye  might  believe  that  Jesus  is  the 

*  Renan  remarks  (iv.  408)  that  the  story  of  our  Lord's  ascension  was 
known  to  the  writer  of  the  Apocalypse ;  for  that  on  this  story  is  based  the 
account  of  the  resurrection,  followed  by  an  ascension,  of  the  two  witnesses, 
xi.  12. 


312  THE   JOHANNINE    BOOKS.  [XVII. 

Christ  the  Son  of  God,  and  that  believing  ye  might  have 
life  through  His  name'(xx.  31).  The  Gospel  bears  the 
marks  of  having  being  written  after  controversy  concerning 
our  Lord's  Person  had  arisen.  The  writer  seems  like  one 
who  has  encountered  objections,  and  who  therefore  antici 
pates  difficulties  by  explanations.  For  example,  he  meets 
the  difficulty,  If  Jesus  walked  on  the  sea  because  there  was 
no  boat  in  which  he  could  follow  His  disciples,  how  was  it 
that  the  multitude  was  able  subsequently  to  follow  Him? 
(vi.  23).  He  meets  the  more  formidable  difficulty,  How 
could  Jesus  be  divine  if  He  was  deceived  in  His  judgment 
of  one  whom  He  had  chosen  to  be  an  Apostle  ?  (ii.  24, 
vi.  71,  xiii.  u.)  All  this  gives  the  more  weight  to  those 
passages  in  the  Gospel  which  assert  or  imply  the  doctrine 
of  the  Godhead  of  our  Lord.  We  know  that  we  are  not 
wresting  chance  expressions  to  a  use  different  from  that 
which  the  writer  intended;  but  that  these  utterances  are 
the  deliberate  expression  of  the  Evangelist's  firm  convic 
tion. 

If  we  find  reason  to  think  that  St.  John  knew  of  previous 
Gospels,  it  is  difficult  to  believe  that  these  were  other  than 
those  we  have  now,  which  all  own  were  written  before  his. 
There  are  several  coincidences  between  St.  John's  Gospel 
and  the  Synoptics,  but  perhaps  hardly  sufficient  of  them 
selves  to  prove  his  obligation  to  them.  He  refers  (iv.  44) 
to  words  of  our  Lord  which  he  had  not  himself  recorded, 
'  For  Jesus  himself  testified  that  a  prophet  hath  no  honour 
in  his  own  country'  (see  Matt.  xiii.  57).  In  the  story  of  the 
miracle  of  feeding  the  five  thousand,  which  is  common  to  all 
four  Gospels,  there  are  coincidences  which,  however,  may 
be  explained  as  arising  from  independent  familiarity  with  the 
facts.  The  mountain  unto  which  our  Lord  ascended  to  pray 
is,  as  in  the  other  Gospels,  '  the  mountain'  TO  0/309.  In  Mat 
thew  and  Mark  a  distinction  is  carefully  made  between  the 
two  miracles  of  feeding  the  multitude,  the  baskets  taken  up 
being  in  the  former  case  Kofavoi,  in  the  latter  o-Trvpi'Seg — a 
distinction,  by  the  way,  scarcely  to  be  accounted  for  if  we 
assume  that  the  common  element  of  those  Gospels  was  only 
Aramaic.  St.  John  agrees  with  the  earlier  Gospels  in  the 


xvii.]    ST.  JOHN'S  COINCIDENCES  WITH  THE  SYNOPTICS.     3 1 3 

use  of  the  word  KO<£II/OI.  St.  John  preserves  a  feature  that 
distinguishes  Mark  from  Matthew,  the  200  pennyworth  of 
bread  which  the  disciples  exclaim  would  be  needed  to  supply 
the  people.  Some  minute  critics  have  accused  John  of  love 
of  exaggeration  because  he  says  (vi.  7)  that  Mark's  200 
pennyworth  (vi.  37)  would  not  be  enough.  It  is  odd  that 
there  is  another  coincidence  between  John  and  Mark  in 
which  the  difference  is  the  other  way.  The  ointment  with 
which  our  Lord  was  anointed  might,  according  to  John 
(xii.  5)  have  been  sold  for  300  pence ;  according  to  Mark 
(xiv.  5)  for  more  than  300  pence.  The  most  striking  coin 
cidence  between  these  two  Evangelists  is  in  the  words  by 
which  this  ointment  is  described,  /xvpov  vdpSov  TTIO-TIKT}?,  the 
last  a  word  which  puzzled  even  Greek  commentators.  If 
the  conclusion  of  St.  Mark's  Gospel  be  genuine,  there  is  a 
further  coincidence  in  the  relation  of  the  appearance  to 
Mary  Magdalene.  John  agrees  with  Luke  in  naming  one 
of  the  Apostles  'Judas,  not  Iscariot,'  who  is  otherwise 
named  in  Matthew  and  Mark.  We  could  not  build  much 
on  the  mere  fact  that  Mary  and  Martha  are  named  by 
both ;  still  less  on  the  name  Lazarus,  which  in  Luke  occurs 
in  a  different  connexion ;  but  the  description  (xii.  2)  of 
Martha  as  '  serving,'  and  the  part  ascribed  to  the  two  sisters 
in  ch.  xi.  are  in  close  harmony  with  St.  Luke's  account. 
Again,  both  Evangelists  speak  of  Satan  entering  into  Judas 
(Luke  xxii.  3,  John  xiii.  27);  and  of  the  Holy  Spirit  as  sent 
by  Jesus  (Luke  xxiv.  49,  John  xvi.  7).  There  appears  to  be 
a  reference  to  an  incident  more  fully  recorded  by  John,  in 
Luke  xxiv.  12,  but  there  is  uncertainty  as  to  the  reading. 

An  interesting  question  is,  Where  could  John  have  read 
the  story  of  our  Lord's  Ascension  ?  If  I  have  been  right  in 
contending  that  John  would  not  have  omitted  to  state  for 
mally  where  our  Lord  had  been  born  unless  he  knew  that 
this  had  been  done  already,  it  seems  also  that  he  would  not 
have  omitted  to  tell  of  the  Ascension  unless  he  had  known 
it  to  have  been  previously  related.  But  if  this  be  so,  we 
have  only  the  choice  of  three  suppositions,  and  the  accept 
ance  of  any  of  them  leads  to  interesting  consequences. 
Either  —  (i)  John  read  Mark  xvi.  19,  and  then  it  would 


3H  THE   JOHANNINE    BOOKS.  [XVII. 

follow  that  words,  which  have  been  questioned  because  they 
were  not  in  some  of  the  copies  seen  by  Eusebius,  were  in 
the  copies  used  by  St.  John  ;  or  (2)  he  read  the  words 
av€<f)ep€To  ets  TOV  ovpcwov  in  Luke  xxiv.  51,  and  this  is  also 
opposed  to  the  decision  of  modern  critics  ;  or  (3)  John  was 
acquainted  with  the  Acts  of  the  Apostles,  and  read  the 
account  of  the  Ascension  in  the  first  chapter. 

I  have  spoken  of  the  things  omitted  by  John  and  told  by 
the  Synoptics.  I  had  intended  to  speak  of  the  things  told 
by  John  and  omitted  by  the  Synoptics ;  but  I  have  not  left 
myself  time  to  speak  of  more  than  one.  I  refer  to  the  fact, 
of  which  notice  has  often  been  taken,  that  the  Synoptics 
relate  no  visit  of  our  Lord  to  Jerusalem  during  His  public 
ministry  save  that  which  ended  in  His  death ;  while  the 
scene  of  almost  all  the  discourses  recorded  by  John  is  laid 
at  Jerusalem,  and  he  relates  visits  of  our  Lord  on  the  occa 
sion  of  more  Jewish  feasts  than  one.  In  fact  it  is  by  the 
help  of  St.  John's  Gospel,  and  by  the  feasts  there  mentioned, 
that  the  duration  of  our  Lord's  ministry  is  calculated.  If  we 
had  none  but  the  Synoptic  Gospels  we  might  acquiesce  in 
the  notion  taken  up  by  some  of  the  early  fathers  from  the 
phrase,  '  the  acceptable  year  of  the  Lord,'  that  His  ministry 
lasted  but  one  year. 

It  used  to  be  one  of  the  stock  objections  to  St.  John  that 
he  is  here  opposed  to  the  more  credible  account  given  by 
the  Synoptics.  But  the  tide  has  now  turned,  and  Renan  has 
pronounced  that  on  this  question  there  is  a  signal  triumph 
for  the  fourth  Gospel.  In  the  first  place,  it  would  be  ex 
tremely  improbable  that  our  Lord  should  have  failed  to  do 
what  every  devout  Jew  made  a  point  of  doing — attend  the 
Jerusalem  feasts.  We  know  that  our  Lord's  parents  com 
plied  with  this  ordinance,  and  brought  Himself  up  to  Jeru 
salem,  when  He  was  only  twelve  years  of  age.  We  know  that 
our  Lord's  Apostles  scrupulously  attended  the  feasts.  After 
the  Passover  at  which  He  suffered,  they  still  came  up  to  the 
following  Pentecost.  Even  St.  Paul,  who  was  not  considered 
sufficiently  national,  made  it  a  point  to  attend  the  feasts  ; 
and  we  are  told  how  on  one  occasion  he  resisted  the  pres 
sing  entreaties  of  Gentile  converts  to  make  a  longer  stay 


xvii.]  OUR  LORD'S  VISITS  TO  JERUSALEM.  315 

with   them,  because   he   was   anxious   to   attend  a  feast  at 
Jerusalem   (Acts   xviii.  20:  see   also  xx.   16).      What,  then, 
can  we  suppose  to  have  been  the  conduct  of  Jesus  Himself, 
who  more  than  once  declared  that  He  came  not  to  destroy 
the  law  but  to  fulfil  it  ?     Further,  if  our  Lord  made  His  ap 
pearance  in  Jerusalem  for  the  first  time  at  His  last  Passover, 
it  seems  incredible   that  the  Jerusalem   priests   and   rulers 
should  have  conceived  so  sudden  a  jealousy  of  their  visitor, 
should  instantly  come  to  the  conclusion  that  His  existence 
was  incompatible  with  the  safety  of  the  nation,  should  at 
once  concert  measures  for  His  destruction,   should  imme 
diately  succeed  in  finding  one  of  His  followers  accessible 
to  bribery,  and  carry  all  their  schemes  into  execution  within 
a  space  less  than  a  week.    All  becomes  plain  and  intelligible, 
if  we  accept  John's  account  that  Jesus  and  the  Jewish  rulers 
had  been  on  more  than  one  previous  occasion  in  collision, 
so  that  he  was  well  known  to  these  rulers,  who  had  resolved 
on  His  death  before  His  last  visit  to  the  city.     St.  John  like 
wise  gives  a  reason  why  on  this  last  visit  a  crisis  was  brought 
about.     According  to  him,  it  was  the  miracle  of  the  raising 
of  Lazarus  which  on  the  one  hand  made  the  Jews  feel  that  it 
was  necessary  to  take  some  decisive  step  in  contravention  of 
the  claims  of  Jesus ;  and  on  the  other  hand  roused  the  hopes 
of  His  adherents  to  such  a  pitch  that  they  went  out  to  meet 
Him,  and  led  Him  in  triumphal  procession  into  the  city. 
Matthew  harmonizes  with  this  account,  although  He  does 
not  state  distinctly,  as  John  does,  that  the  procession  which 
escorted  Jesus  was  made  up  of  Galilean  Jews  who  had  come 
up  to  the  feast.     For  Matthew  (xxi.  10,  u)  represents  the 
multitude  as  crying,  This  is  Jesus  the  Prophet  of  Nazareth, 
of  Galilee ;  while  the  inhabitants  of  Jerusalem  are  moved, 
saying,  Who  is  this  ?     There  seems  to  be  no  ground  for  the 
common  illustration  of  popular  fickleness  in  the  change  of 
the  cries  from  *  Hosanna'  to  '  Crucify  Him/     It  would  seem 
to  be  multitudes  of  Galileans  who  cried  'Hosanna;'  of  the 
native  citizens  who  shouted  '  Crucify  Him.' 

But  to  proceed  with  my  argument,  that  the  first  visit  of  our 
Lord  and  His  Apostles  to  Jerusalem  was  not  that  Passover  at 
which  He  suffered.  What  is  decisive  is  the  fact,  that  when 


316  THE  JOHANNINE   BOOKS.  [xVII. 

we  turn  to  the  Acts  of  the  Apostles  we  find  the  headquarters 
of  the  disciples  and  the  centre  of  the  Apostolic  mission  at  once 
established  in  Jerusalem  :  which  would  be  highly  improbable 
if  they  had  arrived  there  for  the  first  time  only  a  few  days 
before  the  Crucifixion.  Thus,  if  there  was  a  real  contradiction 
between  St.  John  and  the  Synoptic  Gospels  (and  contradiction 
there  is  none,  for  his  account  is  plainly  only  supplementary 
to  theirs ;  but  if  contradiction  there  were)  we  must,  on  all 
grounds  of  historic  probability,  accept  John's  account  as  the 
true  one.  But  when  we  examine  the  Synoptic  Gospels  a  little 
more  closely,  we  find  several  traces  of  a  Judaean  ministry.  I 
will  not  lay  stress  on  the  last  verse  of  the  4th  of  Luke,  though, 
according  to  the  chief  modern  critics,  we  ought  to  read, 
1  preached  in  the  Synagogues  of  Judaea,'  not  Galilee.  This  is 
the  reading  of  Codd.  tf,  B,  and  c,  three  of  the  most  ancient 
extant  MSS.  But  I  may  remark,  in  the  first  place,  that,  accord 
ing  to  the  Synoptic  Gospels,  Judas  the  traitor  was  (as  the 
name  by  which  he  is  commonly  known  indicates)  a  native  of 
Kerioth  in  Judaea  (Josh.  xv.  25) ;  that  Joseph  of  Arimathea, 
'a  city  of  the  Jews'  (Luke  xxiii.  51),  or  Ramathaim,  was  a 
disciple ;  that  the  account  of  the  borrowing  of  the  ass  at 
Bethphage  implies  that  our  Lord  was  already  known  there  ; 
as  does  also  the  demand  of  the  room  at  Jerusalem  in  which  to 
eat  the  Passover.  The  supper  given  at  Bethany,  in  the  house 
of  Simon  the  leper,  was  clearly  given  by  friends,  not  by 
strangers.  But  most  decisive  of  all  are  these  words,  recorded 
both  by  St.  Matthew  and  St.  Luke :  '  O  Jerusalem,  Jerusalem, 
how  often  would  I  have  gathered  thy  children  together,'  which 
plainly  implies  previous  warnings  and  visitations.  The  result 
is,  that  on  this  point,  on  which  a  former  school  of  rationalist 
critics  had  pronounced  John's  Gospel  not  historically  trust 
worthy,  because  opposed  to  the  Synoptics,  he  turns  out  not 
to  be  opposed  to  them,  and  to  state  nothing  but  what,  on 
grounds  of  historic  probability,  we  must  pronounce  to  be  true. 
We  have  here,  then,  as  Renan  has  said,  a  signal  triumph  for 
the  fourth  Gospel. 


(    3'7    ) 


XVIII. 

THE  ACTS   OF   THE   APOSTLES. 


I  COME  now  to  speak  of  the  book  of  the  Acts  of  the 
Apostles.*  It  is,  as  I  said  (p.  34),  a  very  vital  matter 
with  unbelievers  to  bring  this  book  down  to  a  late  date.  For 
if  it  must  be  conceded  that  this  work  was  written  by  a  com 
panion  of  St.  Paul,  it  will  follow  that  the  still  earlier  book, 
the  Gospel,  which  confessedly!  has  the  same  authorship, 
must  have  been  written  by  one  in  immediate  contact  with 
eye-witnesses,  and  must  be  regarded  as  thoroughly  historical. 
I  need  not  spend  much  time  in  discussing  the  external 
evidence.  At  the  end  of  the  second  century,  the  earliest  time 
of  which  we  have  copious  Christian  remains,  the  evidence  of 
Irenaeus,  Tertullian,  and  Clement  of  Alexandria,  shows  the 
authority  of  the  Acts  as  well  established  as  that  of  the  Gos 
pels.  J  The  Muratorian  Fragment  treats  of  this  book  next 
after  the  Gospels.  §  There  is  an  undisputed  reference  to  the 
Acts  in  the  letter  of  the  Churches  of  Vienne  and  Lyons,  A.D. 
177  (Euseb.  v.  i)  ;  and  since  it  has  been  proved  (see  p.  206) 

*  This  is  the  title  of  the  book  in  Clement  of  Alexandria,  in  Tertullian, 
in  the  Muratorian  Fragment,  and  in  Cod.  B.  The  title  « Acts '  in  the 
Sinaitic  MS.,  a  title  used  also  by  Origen,  must  be  regarded  only  as  an 
abridgment.  The  full  title  is  given  in  the  subscription  in  the  Sinaitic. 

t  This  is  '  a  fact  which  no  critic  ventures  to  impugn '  (Davidson,  ii.  146). 
'On  ne  s'arretera  pas  a  prouver  cette  proposition,  laquelle  n'a  jamais  ete 
serieusement  contestee  (Renan,  Les  Apotres,  p.  x.). 

J  Iren.  iii.  14,  15;  Clem.  Alex.  Strom,  v.  12,  Hypotyp.  i.  in  i  Pet. 
(p.  1007,  Potter's  edition) :  see  Euseb.  vi.  14  ;  Tert.  adv.  Marcion,  v.  i,  2, 
De  Jejun.  x. 

$  See  p.  49.  Notwithstanding  the  corruption  of  the  passage  which 
speaks  of  the  Acts,  the  general  drift  is  plain,  viz.  that  the  writer  means  to 
say,  however  erroneously,  that  it  was  Luke's  plan  only  to  relate  things  at 
which  he  had  himself  been  present ;  and  that  we  are  thus  to  account  for 
the  silence  of  the  Acts  as  to  Peter's  martyrdom,  and  as  to  Paul's  journey 
to  Spain. 


318  THE   ACTS    OF   THE   APOSTLES.  [XVIII. 

that  Marcion,  in  the  early  part  of  the  century,  found  the  third 
Gospel  holding  an  established  rank,  we  cannot  doubt  that  the 
Acts  had  obtained  currency  at  the  same  period.  There  are 
several  coincidences  with  the  Acts  in  other  second-century 
writers  ;  but  about  these  I  do  not  care  to  wrangle  with  critics 
who  regard  evidence  that  comes  short  of  demonstration  as  no 
evidence  at  all.  When,  for  example,  Clement  of  Rome  (ch.  2) 
praises  the  Corinthians  for  being  'fonder  of  giving  than  re 
ceiving,*  we  cannot  prove  that  he  had  in  his  mind  our  Lord's 
saying  (Acts  xx.  35),  'It  is  more  blessed  to  give  than  to 
receive  ;'  and  when  Ignatius  (ad  Smyrn.  3),  tells  how  our  Lord, 
after  the  Resurrection,  ate  and  drank  with  the  disciples 
(crwe^ayev  K<U  awciricv),  we  cannot  demonstrate  that  he  knew 
the  (rw€<j)dyo[j.€v  KOL  o-weTTiofjLtv  of  Acts  x.  41,  or  that  in  calling 
heretical  teachers  '  wolves  '  (ad  Philad.  2),  he  was  thinking  of 
Acts  xx.  29.  Let  us  allow  that  Hermas  may  have  been  ignorant 
of  Acts  iv.  12,  when  he  says,  that  there  is  none  other  through 
whom  we  can  be  saved  than  through  the  great  and  glorious 
name  (Vis.  iv.  2)  ;  and  that  it  may  be  pure  accident  that  Poly- 
carp  chanced  upon  words  so  like  those  of  Acts  ii.  24,  when  he 
says  (ad  Philipp.  i.),  'Whom  God  raised  up,  having  loosed 
the  pains  of  Hades.'  Eusebius  tells  (iv.  29)  that  Dionysius 
of  Corinth  relates  that  Dionysius  the  Areopagite,  who  was  con 
verted  to  the  faith  by  Paul  the  Apostle,  according  to  the 
account  given  in  the  Acts,  was  the  first  bishop  of  Athens  ;  and 
as  we  have  not  got  the  letters  of  Dionysius,  we  cannot  confute 
anyone  who  may  be  pleased  to  say  that  the  reference  to  the 
Acts  was  only  made  by  Eusebius,  and  that  it  was  through  some 
other  source  Dionysius  found  that  there  had  been  an  Areo 
pagite  of  his  own  name.  In  like  manner,  let  us  admit  the 
possibility  that  Papias,  who  mentions  Justus,  surnamed  Bar- 
sabas,f  may  have  derived  his  knowledge  of  him  from  some 


tii56vTes  %  \a/u.ftdvoi>T€s.  Lightfoot  gives  a  proof  of  Clement's 
knowledge  of  the  Acts  more  difficult  to  evade,  namely,  that  (ch.  18),  in 
quoting  Psalm  Ixxxix.  20,  he  introduces  three  distinct  phrases,  not  found 
in  the  Psalm  itself,  but  only  in  Paul's  quotation  of  it,  Acts  xiii.  22. 

t  Uairias  fv  r<$  Sevrtpcp  \6yif  \eyei  tin  'ladwr)s  6  QeoAJyos  Kal  'laaw/Joy 
avrov  virb  'lovSaiwv  avrjpedrjffai'.    Tlairias  6  elprj/nevos  iffrSprjcrev  &s 
airb    rwv    dvyarepuv    &i\iirirov    '6n     Bapffafias    6    Kal    'lovffrot 
inrb  rtav    airiffTuJV  ibv  e'xiSfijs  TTI&V   ev  oj/o/iart  rov  Xptffrov 
Kal  #AAa  Qa.vjj.aTa  Kal  nahiara  rb  Kara  TT]V 


XVIII.]  EXTERNAL   EVIDENCE.  319 

source  different  from  the  Acts  ;  and  I  frankly  own  that  anyone 
may  refuse  to  accept  the  opinion,  which  I  hold  myself,  that 
Papias,  who  used  St.  Matthew's  Gospel,  would  have  adopted 
the  account  which  that  Gospel  gives  of  the  death  of  Judas 
Iscariot,  if  he  did  not  read  a  different  story  in  some  document 


Mavaifiov  r-^v  e<c  veicpobv  avaffraffav'  irepl  rwv  virb  rov  Xpiffrov  e/c 
avaffravTcov  '6n  eoos  'ASpiavov  e£a>»/.  This  note  has  been  lately 
printed  by  De  Boor,  in  Harnack's  Texte  und  Untersuchungen  (Band  V, 
Heft  2,  p.  i/o),  from  an  anonymous  note  found  by  him  in  Codex  Baroc- 
cianus,  142.  The  substance  of  what  is  here  stated  about  Justus  Barsabas 
had  been  given  by  Eusebius  (iii.  39)  ;  but  there  are  here  two  or  three 
additional  details,  which  have  all  the  appearance  of  being  derived  from 
independent  knowledge  of  Papias.  The  note  is  conjectured  to  have  been 
extracted  from  the  Ecclesiastical  History  of  Philip  of  Side,  published 
about  A.  D.  427.  The  statement  that  some  of  those  raised  by  Christ  lived 
to  the  reign  of  Hadrian  (A.D.  117-137)  would  be  important  as  fixing  a 
limit  in  one  direction  to  the  date  of  Papias,  if  we  could  be  sure  that  this 
statement  really  comes  from  Papias.  But  it  is  almost  certain  that  there 
has  been  confusion  ;  for  Eusebius,  from  whom  almost  everything  else  in 
these  extracts  is  derived,  gives  this  statement  (iv.  3)  on  the  authority,  not 
of  Papias,  but  of  Quadratus  ;  and  he  could  hardly  have  failed  to  mention 
Papias  if  he  had  known  that  a  like  statement  had  been  made  by  him. 
Still  more  doubt  attaches  to  the  statement  that  John  had  been  killed  by 
the  Jews.  This  account  of  the  death  of  John  is  quite  inconsistent  with  all 
other  known  traditions  on  the  subject;  and  it  may  be  pronounced  in 
credible  that  it  could  have  been  really  given  by  Papias.  For  it  is  incon 
ceivable  that  such  a  statement,  by  so  ancient  a  writer,  should  not  have  the 
slightest  influence  on  Church  tradition  ;  that  neither  Eusebius  nor  anyone 
else  should  have  taken  notice  of  it  ;  that  it  should  be  first  heard  of  in  the 
fifth  century,  and  then  the  knowledge  of  it  almost  lost  till  our  own  genera 
tion.  The  ascription  of  this  statement  to  Papias  had  hitherto  rested  on 
the  authority  of  Georgius  Hamartolus  (circ.  A.  D.  842)  ;  or,  to  speak  more 
cautiously,  on  the  authority  of  a  single  transcriber  of  his  Chronicle  (Cois- 
linianus,  305)  ;  this  note,  not  found  in  any  other  manuscript  of  the 
Chronicle,  having  been  brought  to  light  by  Nolte  (Tubingen  Quartal- 
schrift,  1862,  p.  466).  The  passage  has  been  discussed  by  Lightfoot 
(Essays  on  Supernatural  Religion,  p.  211),  who  sufficiently  shows  the 
violent  improbability  that  Papias  could  have  made  the  statement  attributed 
to  him.  De  Boor  now  considers  that  the  discovery  of  the  fragment  printed 
above  has  placed  it  beyond  all  doubt  that  Papias  really  handed  down  that 
John  was  slain  by  the  Jews.  But,  in  truth,  the  only  thing  placed  beyond 
doubt  is,  that  Georgius,  or  his  transcriber,  did  not  invent  the  statement, 
but  copied  it  from  an  older  author.  But  the  reasons  for  rejecting  the 
ascription  to  Papias  remain  in  full  force,  even  if  that  ascription  has  the 
authority  of  Philip  of  Side.  Lightfoot  has  given  a  probable  account  of 
the  origin  of  the  blunder,  by  whomsoever  made.  It  is  likely  enough  that 
Papias  —  whose  work  we  have  some  reason  to  think  consisted  of  notes  on 
the  Gospels  —  in  commenting  on  Matt.  xx.  23,  noted,  as  fulfilling  our  Lord's 
words,  the  facts  that  John  had  suffered  banishment  to  Patmos,  and  James 
been  slain  by  the  Jews  :  see  Origen's  Commentary  on  the  same  passage 
(in  Matth.,  torn.  xvi.  6),  where  this  explanation  is  given  how  both  sons  of 
Zebedee  could  be  said  to  have  drunk  of  our  Lord's  cup.  The  statement 
then  that  we  are  discussing,  which  attributes  to  both  James  and  John  what 


320  THE   ACTS   OF   THE   APOSTLES.  [XVIII. 

to  which  he  attributed  equal  authority.*  It  is  true  that,  if  we 
accept  the  traditional  account  of  the  authorship  of  the  Acts, 
the  coincidences  I  have  mentioned,  and  several  others,  are  at 
once  accounted  for;  but  if  anyone  chooses  to  say  that  they  are 
all  accidental,  though  I  think  his  assertion  very  improbable,  I 
do  not  care  to  dispute  the  matter  with  him. 

In  fact,  it  is  much  more  important  for  a  critic,  who  opposes 
the  received  authorship  of  the  Acts,  to  impugn  these  early 
quotations  than  it  is  for  us  to  maintain  them.  If  Clement  of 
Rome,  before  the  end  of  the  first  century,  read  the  book, 
there  can  be  no  reasonable  ground  for  doubt  that  the  work 
is  as  early  as  the  Church  has  always  held  it  to  be;  but  if 
Clement  makes  no  quotation  from  it,  no  inference  can  be 
drawn  from  his  silence  about  a  book  to  which  his  subject  in 
no  way  called  on  him  to  refer.  But,  in  point  of  fact,  our 
reception  of  the  Acts  scarcely  at  all  depends  on  these  proofs 
of  the  early  use  of  the  book.  It  is  an  important  point,  no 
doubt,  to  establish  that  the  book  we  have  now  was  received 
without  hesitation  by  the  Christian  Church  as  far  back  as  we 
can  trace  its  history ;  yet  if  this  work  were  a  new  '  find,' 
recently  disinterred  from  some  Eastern  library,  we  still  might 
be  confident  that  we  have  here  some  genuine  remains  of  the 
Apostolic  age.  In  fact,  the  internal  evidence  of  the  latter 
chapters  of  the  Acts  proves  irresistibly  that  these  contain 
matter  which  must  have  proceeded  from  an  eye-witness. 
In  saying  this,  I  say  no  more  than  our  adversaries  acknow 
ledge.  Davidson  says  (ii.  136)  of  the  so-called  'we*  sections 
of  the  Acts,  that  is  to  say,  the  sections  in  which  the  writer 
uses  the  first  person  plural,  that  they  are  'characterized  by 
a  circumstantiality  of  detail,  a  vividness  of  description,  an 
exact  knowledge  of  localities,  an  acquaintance  with  the 
phrases  and  habits  of  seamen,  which  betray  one  who  was 
personally  present.' 

Papias,  as  I  believe,  only  said  of  James,  may  have  assumed  its  form  either 
through  the  dropping  out  of  a  line  by  a  transcriber,  or  through  the 
inaccuracy  of  a  memoriter  citation. 

*  Apollinarius  of  Laodicea,  through  whom  we  obtain  our  knowledge  of 
this  matter,  reconciles  the  accounts  in  Matthew  and  in  the  Acts  by  stating, 
as  on  Papias' s  authority,  that  Judas  did  not  die  when  he  hanged  himself, 
but  that  his  body  afterwards  so  swelled,  that  in  passing  through  a  place 
wide  enough  for  a  cart  to  go  through,  he  was  so  crushed  that  all  his 
bowels  were  emptied  out  (Routh,  Rell.  Sac,,  i.  9). 


XVIII.]  EXTERNAL   EVIDENCE.  321 

If  you  know  nothing  of  the  history  of  the  controversy, 
you  will  perhaps  imagine  that  such  a  concession  as  I  have 
quoted,  and  which  is  no  more  than  is  readily  made  by  all 
critics  of  the  same  school,  amounts  to  a  recognition  of  the 
antiquity  of  the  book  of  the  Acts.     But  this  is  not  the  only 
case  where  theorists  of  the  sceptical  school   will   make  a 
forced  concession,  and  hope  to  save  the  main  part  of  their 
hypothesis   from   destruction.      These   hypotheses   are   like 
some  living  beings  of  low  organization,  which  it  is  hard  to 
kill,  because  when  you  lay  hold  of  one  of  them,  the  creature 
will  leave  half  its  body  in  your  hands,  and  walk  off  without 
suffering  any  apparent  inconvenience.     When  we  encounter 
a  theory  impugning  the  authority  of  one  of  our  New  Testa 
ment  books,  if  we  point  out  passages  in  the  book  containing 
marks  of  genuineness  which  cannot  plausibly  be  contested, 
then  so  much  of  the  theory  will  be  abandoned  as  disputes 
the  genuineness  of  these  particular  passages ;  but  it  is  still 
hoped  to  maintain  the  spuriousness  of  the  rest.*     If  it  is 
pointed  out  that  the  passages  acknowledged  as  genuine  are 
indissolubly  connected   with  some  of  those  alleged   to  be 
spurious,  the  theory  will  then  be  modified  again,  just  so  far 
as  is  necessary  to  meet  this  new  difficulty.     In  the  present 
case  the  marks  of  genuineness  in  the  '  we '  sections  are  too 
strong  to  be  denied.     It  is  therefore  found  unavoidable  to 
own  that  this  part  of  the  book  of  the  Acts  is  a  real  relic  of 
the  Apostolic  age;  but  the  Tubingen  theory  is  that    some 
compiler  who  lived  in  the  second  century  happened  to  get 
possession  of  memoranda  really  made  by  a  travelling  com 
panion  of  St.  Paul,  whose  name  we  don't  know,  and  that  the 
compiler  incorporated  these  in  a  narrative,  in  the  main  un- 
authentic,  and  intended  to  disguise  the  early  history  of  the 
Christian  Church.     Thus,  Hooykaas  (see  p.  295)  says  (v.  33), 
'  As  to  the  later  fortunes  of  St.  Paul,  the  writer  of  Acts  had 
access  to  some  very  good  authorities,  the  best  of  all  being 
the  itinerary  or  journal  of  travels  composed  by  one  of  the 
Apostle's  companions.      Portions  of  this  work  he  took  up 


*  In  particular,  this  is  the  history  of  the  criticism  of  the  2nd  Epistle  to 
Timothy. 


322  THE   ACTS   OF  THE   APOSTLES.  [XVIII. 

almost  unaltered  into  his  own.  In  this  itinerary,  then,  we 
possess  the  records  of  an  eye-witness.  This  is  of  incal 
culable  value.' 

The  '  almost  unaltered '  of  this  extract  are  words  that  all 
critics  of  the  same  school  would  not  adopt.  The  evidence 
of  identity  of  language  and  style  is  so  strong  as  to  convince 
even  prejudiced  critics  that  the  '  we '  sections,  as  they  stand 
now,  bear  marks  of  the  same  hand  as  that  to  which  we  owe 
the  rest  of  the  book ;  while  also  these  sections  contain  rela 
tions  of  miracles  which  the  same  critics  are  unwilling  to 
believe  were  told  by  a  contemporary.  So  the  theory  which 
simply  separated  the  authorship  of  the  '  we '  sections  from 
that  of  the  rest  is  owned  to  be  inadequate ;  and  it  is  now 
usually  presented  with  the  addition  that  the  second-century 
compiler,  when  incorporating  these  sections  in  his  book, 
revised  and  retouched  them,  and  made  to  them  some  addi 
tions  of  his  own. 

Who  was  the  original  writer  of  the  memoranda,  rationalist 
critics  are  not  agreed.  The  claims  of  Timothy  have  been 
strongly  urged,  notwithstanding  that,  to  name  no  other  ob 
jection,  Timothy  is  expressly  distinguished  from  the  writer 
who  uses  the  first  person  plural  (ch.  xx.  4,  5).  Silas  has  had 
his  advocates,  but  the  favourite  seems  to  be  Titus ;  and, 
accordingly,  Hooykaas  always  refers  to  the  author  of  the 
memoranda  as  Titus  (?)  Why  St.  Luke,  with  or  without  a 
note  of  interrogation,  might  not  have  been  left  in  possession 
of  the  authorship  of  the  memoranda,  even  if  he  were  deprived 
of  that  of  the  rest  of  the  book,  is  not,  at  first  sight,  easy  to 
explain  :  for  even  with  critics  of  this  school  it  ought  not  to 
be  thought  a  disadvantage  to  an  hypothesis  that  it  should 
have  some  amount  of  historical  attestation.  Paul's  Epistles 
(Col.  iv.  14 ;  Philem.  24;  2  Tim.  iv.  u)  show  that  he  had  a 
companion  of  the  name  of  Luke.  If  it  were  conceded  that 
he  was  the  author  of  the  '  we '  sections,  at  least  in  their 
original  form,  it  would  seem  to  explain  why  the  whole  book 
should  be  attributed  to  him. 

But  here  is  a  circumstance  of  which  it  is  well  worth  while 
to  take  notice.  The  name  of  Luke  is  not  found  in  connexion 
with  the  Acts  in  any  extant  uncial  MS.  ;  and  we  cannot  but 


XVIII.]  THE    'WE'    SECTIONS.  323 

think  that  the  ascription  would  have  been  preserved,  had  it 
been  found  in  earlier  MSS.  On  the  other  hand,  the  name  of 
Luke  is  invariably  inscribed  to  the  third  Gospel.  We  cannot, 
then,  reasonably  suppose  the  history  of  the  ascription  to  be 
that  the  name  of  Luke  was  originally  attached  only  to  the 
latter  part  of  the  Acts;  that  it  then  passed  to  the  whole  book; 
and  being  accepted,  on  the  faith  of  their  MSS.,  by  Christians 
of  the  second  century,  was  afterwards  extended  to  the  Gospel 
which  they  perceived  to  be  of  the  same  authorship.  The  true 
history  seerns  to  be  just  the  reverse.  It  would  appear  to  be 
from  the  Gospel  that  the  name  of  Luke  passed  to  the  Acts ; 
and  then  a  verification  of  that  ascription  is  afforded  by  the 
fact  that  we  find  from  the  Epistles  that  Paul  had  a  com 
panion  named  Luke.  In  any  case,  I  cannot  account  for  the 
reluctance  of  rationalist  critics  to  own  Luke  as  the  author  of 
what  they  regard  as  the  original  portions  of  the  Acts,  except 
through  a  feeling  on  their  part  that  the  name  of  Luke  is 
indissolubly  connected  with  the  third  Gospel. 

It  is  time  that  I  should  formally  remind  you  what  those 
*  we '  sections  of  which  I  have  been  speaking  are.  They 
begin  Acts  xvi.  9.  Luke  appears  to  have  joined  Paul  at 
Troas,  and  to  have  accompanied  him  to  Philippi.  There  he 
seems  to  have  been  left  behind;  for  when  Paul  leaves  Philippi 
the  use  of  the  pronoun  '  we '  ceases,  and  is  not  resumed  until 
Paul  returns  to  Philippi,  some  six  or  seven  years  after.  Then 
(ch.  xx.  5)  the  'we'  begins  again,  and  continues  till  the 
arrival  in  Jerusalem  (xxi.  18).  It  begins  again  in  chap.  27 
with  Paul's  voyage,  and  continues  till  his  arrival  in  Rome, 
xxviii.  1 6.  I  may  add  that  in  Codex  D,  which  in  the  Acts  is 
full  of  untrustworthy  additions  to  the  text,  the  tradition  that 
Luke  was  of  Antioch  is  attested  by  a  *  we'  in  Acts  xi.  28,  the 
prophecy  of  Agabus  being  described  as  having  taken  place 
'  when  we  were  gathered  together.'  I  only  mention  this 
reading,  but  not  as  having  any  title  to  your  acceptance. 
Some  have  excluded  from  the  'we'  sections  the  part  contain 
ing  Paul's  address  at  Miletus ;  but  unreasonably.  For,  though 
in  the  latter  part  of  the  2oth  chapter  the  narrator  has  had  no 
occasion  to  speak  in  the  first  person,  he  claims  in  the  first 
verse  of  the  next  chapter  to  have  been  one  of  the  party  who 

Y  2 


324  THE   ACTS   OF   THE   APOSTLES.  [XVIII. 

had  to  tear  themselves  away  from  the  sorrowing  embraces  of 
their  Ephesian  friends. 

I  may  mention  here  that  some  thoughtless  objectors  *  have 
taken  for  a  note  of  spuriousness  in  this  narrative  what  is  really 
a  proof  of  genuineness.  Paul,  it  is  said,  is  represented 
(xx.  17)  as  in  such  a  hurry  to  get  to  Jerusalem  that  he  will  not 
visit  Ephesus,  yet  afterwards  he  spends  a  week  at  Tyre  (xxi.  4), 
and  '  many  days'  at  Caesarea  (v.  10).  But  it  is  quite  natural 
that  Paul  should  calculate  his  time  differently  before  crossing 
the  sea  and  afterwards.  Even  in  times  much  later  than  St. 
Paul's,  travellers  in  those  seas  have  not  been  able  to  count  on 
expedition.  The  author  of  Eothen  says  that  when  he  read 
the  Odyssey  he  had  thought  ten  years  rather  a  long  time  for 
the  hero  to  spend  on  his  voyage  home  from  Troy,  but  that 
since  he  had  had  personal  experience  of  navigation  in  these 
parts,  he  had  come  to  the  opinion  that  Ulysses  had  a  fair 
average  passage.  It  appears  (xx.  16)  that  Paul  at  the  begin 
ning  of  his  voyage  was  by  no  means  sure  of  being  able  to 
reach  Jerusalem  at  the  time  he  wished.  Actually,  he  only 
succeeded  in  obtaining  a  passage  in  a  ship  which  went  no 
further  than  Patara.  He  could  not  foresee  what  delay  he 
might  encounter  there ;  but  after  he  had  caught  a  ship  for 
Tyre,  and  made  a  prosperous  voyage  thither,  he  could  calcu 
late  his  time  differently ;  and,  notwithstanding  his  week's  delay 
at  Tyre,  might  feel  that  he  had  several  days  at  his  disposal  at 
Caesarea  before  he  needed  to  begin  his  land  journey  to  Jeru 
salem.  There  are  other  frivolous  objections,  all  proceeding 
on  the  assumption  that  Paul  owned  a  yacht,  or  chartered  a 
ship  of  his  own,  whereas  I  suppose  the  probability  is,  that  he 
had  to  accommodate  himself  to  the  movements  of  the  ships 
in  which  he  found  passage.  Thus,  why  did  not  Paul  go  him 
self  to  Ephesus  instead  of  sending  a  messenger  to  fetch  his 
friends  from  that  city  ?  I  daresay  because  he  did  not  choose 
to  run  the  risk  that  the  ship  might  sail  without  him  if  he  went 
away  from  Miletus.  Why  did  not  Paul  send  his  message 
from  Trogyllium,  which  was  nearer,  rather  than  from  Miletus  ? 
I  suppose  because  he  knew  that  the  ship  would  not  make  a 

*  See  Hooykaas,  vi.  332. 


XVIII.]  THE    'WE*    SECTIONS.  325 

sufficiently  long  delay  at  Trogyllium,  and  that  it  would  at 
Miletus.  At  the  same  time  it  may  be  remarked  that  MSS.  are 
not  unanimous  as  to  the  ship  having  touched  at  Trogyllium 
at  all.  But,  in  short,  I  think  the  best  rationalist  critics  show 
their  wisdom  in  abandoning  all  direct  assaults  on  the  'we7 
sections  as  futile,  and  in  restricting  their  efforts  to  the  sepa 
ration  of  these  from  the  rest  of  the  book. 

But  in  this  they  have  great  difficulties.  I  pass  over  the 
initial  difficulty,  which  to  me  seems  sufficiently  formidable  : — 
How  are  we  to  account  for  the  fact  that  an  unknown  person 
in  the  second  century  got  exclusive  possession  of  some  of  the 
most  precious  relics  of  the  Apostolic  age — relics  the  authenti 
city  of  which  is  proved  by  internal  evidence,  and  yet  of  which 
no  one  but  this  compiler  seems  ever  to  have  heard,  while  the 
compiler  himself  vanished  out  of  knowledge  ?  The  rationalist 
critics  would  scarcely  make  their  story  more  miraculous  if 
they  presented  their  legend  in  the  form,  that  the  'we'  sections 
were  brought  to  Rome  by  an  angel  from  heaven,  who  imme 
diately  after  disappeared.  But  new  difficulties  arise  when 
they  try  to  tear  the  '  we '  sections  away  from  the  rest  of  the 
Acts  ;  for  this  book  is  not  one  of  those  low  organizations 
which  do  not  resent  being  pulled  asunder.  It  is  on  the  con 
trary  a  highly  organized  structure,  showing  evident  marks 
that  the  whole  proceeded  from  a  single  author.  Thus  refe 
rences,  direct  or  implied,  are  repeatedly  made  from  one  part 
of  the  book  to  another.  The  speech  of  Paul  in  the  latter  part 
of  the  book  (xxii.  20)  refers  with  some  verbal  coincidences  to 
the  part  he  took  in  the  martyrdom  of  Stephen  (vii.  58,  viii.  i). 
In  the  'we'  section  (xxi.  8)  where  Philip  is  mentioned,  he  is 
described  as  '  one  of  the  seven '  (Acts  vi.  5),  while  his  presence 
at  Caesarea  has  been  accounted  for  (viii.  40).  Peter  in  his 
speech  (xv.  8)  refers  to  former  words  of  his  recorded  (x.  47). 
Words  are  put  into  our  Lord's  mouth  (i.  5)  similar  to  words 
which  in  the  Gospels  are  only  attributed  to  John  the  Baptist, 
and  these  words  are  quoted  as  our  Lord's  (xi.  16).* 


*  Other  cross  references  are  to  be  found  on  comparing  xi.  19,  viii.  i  ;  xi. 
25,  ix.  30 ;  xv.  38,  xiii.  13  ;  xvi.  4,  xv.  28 ;  xviii.  5,  xvii.  14  ;  xxi.  29,  xx.  4 ; 
xxiv.  18,  xxi.  26;  xxvi.  32,  xxv.  II. 


326  THE   ACTS   OF   THE  APOSTLES.  [XVIII. 

I  will  notice  one  coincidence  more  between  the  earlier 
chapters  and  the  later,  which  I  think  not  only  proves  unity 
of  authorship,  but  also  that  the  author  lived  near  the  events — 
I  mean  the  part  which  both  divisions  of  the  Acts  ascribe  to 
the  Sadducees  in  the  persecution  of  the  infant  Church.  In 
the  Gospels  the  chief  opponents  of  our  Lord  are  the  Scribes 
and  Pharisees.  A  Christian  writer  of  the  second  century 
would  hardly  have  known  or  cared  much  about  the  internal 
divisions  among  the  Jews,  and  would  naturally  have  followed 
the  Gospels  in  giving  greater  prominence  to  Pharisaic  hos 
tility  to  the  Gospel.  But  St.  Luke  makes  us  understand  that, 
after  the  death  of  our  Lord,  His  disciples  obtained  among  the 
Pharisees  toleration  or  friendship,  which  was  refused  them  by 
the  Sadducees.  The  Resurrection  was  the  main  subject  of 
the  Christian  preaching,  and  this  at  once  put  the  Christians 
on  the  side  of  the  Pharisees  in  their  chief  subject  of  dispute 
with  the  Sadducees ;  while  again  the  Pharisees  found  no  dif 
ficulty  in  believing  the  Gospel  accounts  of  angelic  messages, 
which  the  Sadducees  rejected  as  incredible.  Further,  the 
charge  of  having  shed  innocent  blood  most  painfully  affected 
the  Sadducees,  who  at  the  time  held  the  chief  place  in  the 
government  of  the  nation  (Acts  v.  17,  28).  These  considera 
tions  make  Luke's  account  highly  credible,  that  the  Jerusalem 
Church  counted  among  its  members  a  large  proportion  of 
Pharisees  (xv.  5,  xxi.  20).  St.  Paul  in  one  of  his  Epistles 
(Phil.  iii.  5)  confirms  the  account  of  the  Acts  that  he  had  him 
self  been  a  Pharisee  ;  and  if  Luke  were  a  companion  of  Paul's 
we  can  understand  how  he  should  have  imbibed  the  feelings 
which  led  him  to  give  such  prominence  to  the  hostility  of 
the  Sadducees  to  Christian  teaching  (iv.  i,  v.  17).  In  this 
representation  the  book  is  consistent  all  through  :  the  *  Scribes 
that  were  of  the  Pharisees'  part'  (xxiii.  9)  interfere  to  protect 
Paul  from  the  violence  of  the  Sadducees,  much  in  the  same 
way  as  the  chief  Pharisaic  Rabbi,  Gamaliel,  is  represented  at 
the  beginning  of  the  book  (v.  30),  as  interfering  on  behalf  of 
the  elder  Apostles. 

An  independent  proof  of  the  unity  of  authorship  is  ob 
tained  from  a  study  of  the  language.  Tables  have  been  made 
of  words,  phrases,  and  turns  of  expression  characterizing  the 


XVIII.]  UNITY  OF  AUTHORSHIP.  327 

Gospel ;  and  these  are  found  reappearing  in  the  Acts,  and  in 
all  parts  equally,  in  the  latter  chapters  as  much  as  in  the 
earlier.  It  is  not  easy  to  lay  before  you  details  of  the  proof 
of  the  homogeneousness  of  the  diction  of  the  book,  because 
no  inference  could  be  fairly  drawn  from  only  a  few  examples 
of  recurring  phrases,  and  it  would  be  tedious  to  produce  a 
great  many ;  but  it  is  not  necessary,  since  the  point  is  acknow 
ledged,  and  is  accounted  for,  as  I  have  said,  by  the  theory 
that  the  later  compiler  revised  and  retouched  the  sections 
which  he  borrowed.  '  From  these  linguistic  and  other  phe 
nomena,'  says  Davidson  (u.  145),  'it  is  clear  that  the  writer 
of  the  book  was  not  a  mere  compiler  but  an  author.  If  he 
used  materials,  he  did  not  put  them  together  so  loosely  as  to 
leave  their  language  and  style  in  the  state  he  got  them,  but 
wrought  up  the  component  parts  into  a  work  having  its  own 
characteristics.'  And  yet  we  are  asked  to  suppose  that,  with 
all  this  revision,  the  compiler  did  his  work  so  clumsily  as  to 
leave  in  that  tell-tale  '  we/  the  sections,  too,  where  the  '  we ' 
occurs  being  separated  from  each  other  in  the  most  inartificial 
manner.  Here  comes  in  the  consideration  that  the  compiler 
of  the  Gospel  and  the  Acts  was  evidently  a  person  of  con 
siderable  literary  skill.  The  less  you  believe  (I  will  not  say 
in  the  inspiration  of  the  writer,  but)  in  his  substantial  truth 
fulness,  the  more  you  must  admire  his  literary  skill.  Where 
he  and  the  other  Synoptic  Evangelists  differ  in  their  language 
in  relating  the  same  story,  the  difference  is  often  accounted 
for  by  the  supposition  that  the  third  Evangelist  gave  the  lan 
guage  of  his  predecessors  a  literary  revision.  Take  the  letter 
of  Claudius  Lysias  in  the  Acts.  If  we  are  not  to  believe  that 
this  was  the  real  letter  the  chief  captain  sent,  what  dramatic 
skill  it  required  to  have  invented  it,  making  the  chief  captain, 
by  a  gentle  distortion  of  the  facts,  give  them  the  colouring 
which  sets  his  own  conduct  in  the  most  favourable  light. 
There  is  the  same  dramatic  propriety  in  the  exordium  of 
Tertullus,  the  hearing  before  Agrippa,  the  proceedings  be 
fore  Gallic ;  or,  to  go  back  still  earlier,  in  the  story  of  Peter 
knocking  at  the  door,  and  Rhoda  so  delighted  that  she  runs 
off  with  the  news  without  waiting  to  open  to  him.  A  critic 
must  be  destitute  of  the  most  elementary  qualifications  for 


328  THE  ACTS  OF  THE  APOSTLES. 

his  art  who  does  not  perceive  that  the  writer  of  the  Acts  is 
no  uneducated  clumsy  patcher  together  of  documents,  but 
a  literary  artist  who  thoroughly  understands  how  to  tell  a 
story.  And  yet  we  are  asked  to  believe  that  this  skilled 
artist,  having  got  possession  of  memoranda  of  one  of  Paul's 
companions,  shovels  them  into  his  book  pell-mell,  without 
even  taking  the  trouble  to  hide  the  discontinuity  of  his  work 
by  turning  the  first  person  into  the  third.  If  we  suppose 
Luke  to  have  been  the  author,  there  is  no  want  of  literary 
skill,  but  only  great  modesty  in  the  quiet  way  in  which  he 
distinguishes  these  parts  of  the  history  of  which  he  claims  to 
have  been  an  eye-witness.* 

What,  then,  are  the  motives  why  such  violence  should  be 
used  to  separate  the  'we'  sections  from  the  rest  of  the  book  ? 
There  are  two  principal  reasons.  One  of  these  is  that  which 
I  explained  in  the  first  lecture.  It  is  thought  impossible 
that  a  book,  so  pervaded  by  miracles  as  the  Acts,  could  be 
the  work  of  one  who  was  a  contemporary  with  the  events 
which  he  relates.  There  are  those  now  who  seem  to  have 
got  beyond  the  doctrine  that  a  miracle  is  impossible ;  they 
seem  to  hold  it  impossible  that  anyone  should  ever  have 
believed  in  a  miracle.  Whether  the  former  doctrine  be  good 
philosophy  or  not  I  am  not  going  to  discuss  ;  but  I  am  very 
sure  that  the  latter  doctrine  leads  to  bad  criticism. 

The  history  of  the  criticism  on  this  very  book  shows  how 
very  unsafe  it  is  to  take  this  principle  as  a  guide.  By  deny 
ing  the  contemporary  authorship  of  all  but  the  'we'  sections, 

*  Renan  agrees  in  the  conclusions  here  expressed.  With  regard  to  the 
supposition  that  the  compiler  merely  retained  the  first  person  plural  which 
he  found  in  an  earlier  document,  he  says  (Les  Apotres.  xi.)  :  <  Cette  expli 
cation  est  bien  peu  admissible.  On  comprendrait  tout  au  plus  une  telle 
negligence  dans  une  compilation  grossiere.  Mais  le  troisieme  Evangile  et 
les  Actes  forment  un  ouvrage  tres-bien  redige,  compose  avec  reflexion,  et 
meme  avec  art,  ecrit  d'une  meme  main,  et  d'apres  un  plan  suivi.  Les 
deux  livres  reunis  font  un  ensemble  absolument  du  meme  style,  presentant 
les  memes  locutions  favorites  et  la  meme  fa9on  de  citer  1'Ecriture.  Une 
faute  de  redaction  aussi  choquante  que  celle  dont  il  s'agit  serait  inexpli 
cable.  On  est  done  invinciblement  porte  a  conclure  que  celui  qui  a  ecrit 
la  fin  de  T ouvrage  en  a  ecrit  le  commencement,  et  que  le  narrateur  du  tout 
est  celui  qui  dit  "  nous  "  aux  passages  precites.' 


XVIII.]  UNITY   OF  AUTHORSHIP.  329 

it  is,  no  doubt,  possible  to  remove  from  the  book  much  of 
the  supernatural ;  but  much  is  left  behind.  The  author  of 
these  memoranda  also  has  several  miracles  to  tell  of.  I  may 
remind  you  of  all  the  occurrences  at  Philippi,  the  testimony 
borne  to  Paul  and  Silas  by  the  possessed  damsel,  and  her 
cure  by  them,  the  earthquake  in  the  prison,  and  the  opening 
of  the  prison  doors.*  If  the  story  of  the  shipwreck  is,  beyond 
any  other  part,  full  of  touches  showing  that  we  have  the  re 
port  of  an  eye-witness,  this  part,  too,  contains  the  supernatural 
facts  of  a  vision  seen  by  Paul,  and  of  his  predictions  as  to 
the  issue  of  the  voyage,  which  are  accurately  fulfilled.  And 
when  Paul  and  his  companions  get  safe  to  shore  at  Melita, 
we  are  told  the  story  of  the  viper,  and  of  miraculous  cures 
effected  by  Paul  on  the  island.  So  the  remedy  has  been 
applied,  of  cutting  out  from  the  '  we '  sections  all  the  super 
natural  portions,  and  treating  these  as  additions  made  by  the 
later  compiler-! 

It  can  be  shown  that  the  parts  which  it  is  proposed  to  cut 
out  are  indissolubly  connected  with  those  which  are  left  be 
hind  ;  but  I  do  not  enter  into  the  proof,  because  I  hold  that 
criticism  so  arbitrary  does  not  deserve  an  elaborate  refutation. 
And  in  truth  it  seems  to  me  that  the  human  intellect  cannot 
be  less  profitably  employed  than  in  constructing  a  life  of 
Paul,  such  as  might  have  been  written  by  a  Christian  of  the 
first  century  who  conceived  miracle  to  be  an  impossibility. 

*  '  The  circumstances  relating  to  the  imprisonment  of  Paul  and  Silas  at 
Philippi  are  sufficient  to  disprove  the  authorship  of  an  eye- witness'  (David 
son,  ii.  149). 

f  This  has  been  done,  amongst  others,  by  Overbeck  in  his  Preface  to- 
his  edition  of  De  Wette's  Handbook  on  the  Acts.  Overbeck  has  at  least 
decisively  proved  that  the  '  we '  sections,  as  they  stand  now,  are  so  full  of 
the  characteristics  of  the  author  of  the  rest  of  the  book,  that  the  hypo 
thesis  that  those  sections  were  borrowed  from  another  is  not  tenable,  un 
less  we  assert  that  the  borrower  interpolated  them  with  much  of  his  own, 
and  that  in  these  interpolations  he  dishonestly  used  the  pronoun  '  we.' 
Overbeck' s  Preface  has  been  translated,  and  included  in  the  publications 
of  the  Theological  Translation  Fund.  In  the  same  volume  is  contained 
a  translation  of  the  chief  work  of  the  Tubingen  school  on  the  Acts,  that 
by  Zeller. 

Zeller,  a  pupil  and  fellow -labourer  of  Baur's,  was  born  in  1814,  and  was 
Professor  of  Theology  at  Berne  in  1847  ;  afterwards  Professor  of  Philo 
sophy  at  Heidelberg,  and  at  Berlin,  1872. 

Franz  Overbeck,  born  at  St.  Petersburg,  1837,  Professor  of  Theology 
at  Basle,  1870. 


330  THE   ACTS   OF   THE   APOSTLES.  [xVIII. 

A  critic  might  as  well  spend  his  time  in  making  a  new 
edition  of  the  play  of  Hamlet  or  Macbeth,  cutting  out  as 
non-Shaksperian  every  passage  which  implied  a  belief  in  the 
supernatural. 

But  in  addition  to  the  predominance  of  the  miraculous  in 
the  Acts,  every  disciple  of  Baur  has  a  reason  for  rejecting 
the  book,  in  its  irreconcilable  opposition  to  the  Tubingen 
theory  of  the  mutual  hostility  of  Paul  and  the  original 
Apostles.  Here  we  have  what  professes  to  be  a  history  of 
Paul  by  one  of  his  friends ;  and  the  writer  is  absolutely  no 
Paulinist  in  the  Tubingen  sense  of  the  word.  He  represents 
Paul  as  on  friendly  terms  with  Peter  and  James,  and  these 
Apostles  as  anxious  to  remove  any  cause  of  offence  or  sus 
picion  between  the  Apostle  of  the  Gentiles  and  the  Church 
of  Jerusalem,  while  Paul  himself  is  represented  as  most  ready 
to  meet  their  wishes  in  this  respect.  Paul  is  represented  as 
observing  Jewish  ordinances,  and  as  going  up,  on  several 
occasions,  to  the  Jewish  feasts  at  Jerusalem ;  while  in  his 
speeches,  as  reported  by  St.  Luke,  there  is  little  or  nothing 
said  about  the  doctrine  of  justification  by  faith  without  the 
works  of  the  law.  Peter's  speeches  in  the  Acts  so  thoroughly 
agree  in  doctrine  with  Paul,  that  they  might  have  been 
written  by  Paul  or  by  one  of  his  disciples.  Finally,  Peter  is 
made  to  anticipate  Paul  in  the  work  of  preaching  to  the 
Gentiles,  while  Paul  himself  is  represented  as  only  led  into 
that  work  by  the  force  of  circumstances.  When  he  and 
Barnabas  start  on  their  first  missionary  tour,  the  method 
with  which  they  commence  is  to  preach  the  Gospel  only  in 
the  synagogues  of  the  Jews  (Acts  xiii.  5).  But  in  such 
synagogues  there  was  always  present  a  certain  number  of 
Gentiles,  who  had  revolted  at  the  absurdities  and  immoralities 
of  heathen  religions,  and  who  heard  with  interest,  or  who  had 
even  formally  embraced,  the  monotheism  and  pure  morality 
of  Jewish  teachers.  Among  these  Gentile  members  of  the 
congregations  Paul  is  represented  as  finding  his  most  willing 
hearers.  And  at  Antioch  in  Pisidia,  when  the  Christian 
teachers  encounter  such  violent  opposition  from  the  Jewish 
part  of  the  audience,  that  they  can  no  longer  continue  their 
preaching  in  the  synagogue,  they  gladly  avail  themselves  of 


XVIII.]        THE  TUBINGEN  VERSION  OF  PAUL'S  HISTORY.         331 

the  friendly  reception  which  the  Gentiles  are  willing  to  give 
them,  and  continue  their  labours  among  them  (Acts  xiii.  46). 
But  the  system  of  beginning  by  preaching  to  the  Jews  is 
kept  up  in  other  cities. 

We  are  told  by  Baur's  disciples  that  the  history  of  Paul, 
as  told  by  Luke,  which  I  have  just  summarized,  is  a  complete 
falsification  of  the  true  history.  This  true  history  is  that 
Paul,  even  before  his  conversion,  had  seen  clearly  that  to 
become  an  adherent  of  Jesus  of  Nazareth,  who  had  been 
condemned  by  the  Law,  and  been  loaded  with  its  curse,  was 
to  renounce  allegiance  to  the  Law.  It  involved  the  acceptance 
of  a  new  way  of  salvation,  in  which  Jews  had  no  higher  claim 
than  Gentiles,  and  it  thus  abandoned  all  national  privileges. 
In  a  word,  the  preaching  of  the  Crucified  drew  with  it  the 
overthrow  of  the  whole  Jewish  religion.  Viewing  the  matter 
thus,  Paul  persecuted  Christianity  as  a  pestilent  heresy.  But 
when  he  came  to  be  shaken  in  his  conviction  that  the  cross 
had  refuted  the  claims  of  Jesus,  and  when  he  had  accepted 
the  Resurrection  as  a  fact,  he  did  not  cease  to  see,  what  had 
been  evident  to  him  before,  that  the  acceptance  of  a  crucified 
Saviour  involved  a  complete  breach  with  the  Law.  So  he 
strove  to  find  how  this  new  revelation  was  to  be  reconciled 
with  God's  old  one.  He  knew  that  he  could  get  no  light  from 
the  Twelve,  who  did  not  see  what  he  had  discerned  before  his 
conversion.  So  he  retired  to  Arabia,  thought  out  the  whole 
matter  for  himself,  and  the  result  was  that  he  broke  entirely 
with  his  old  past,  and  the  Jew  in  him  had  died  for  ever.  He 
went  to  Damascus,  and  there  at  once  began  to  preach  to  the 
heathen.  When  obliged  to  flee  thence,  he  preached  to  the 
heathen  elsewhere,  making  Antioch  his  head-quarters.  As 
to  his  beginning  by  preaching  to  Jews,  we  are  not  to 
believe  a  word  of  it.  The  communities  of  Judea  probably 
knew  little  of  the  substance  of  his  preaching  ;  otherwise  they 
would  have  had  little  reason  to  be  satisfied  with  it,  for  Paul 
neither  observed  the  Mosaic  Law  himself,  nor  permitted  his 
converts,  whether  of  Jewish  birth  or  not,  to  do  so.  We  are 
not  to  believe  the  author  of  the  Acts,  who  would  have  us 
think  (xxi.  24,  25)  that  a  difference  was  made  as  to  the  con 
duct  of  Jewish  and  of  Gentile  Christians  in  such  matters. 


332  THE  ACTS  OF  THE  APOSTLES. 

Now,  on  comparing  these  two  accounts,  we  cannot  help 
observing  that  it  is  the  enemies  of  the  supernatural  who 
give  a  miraculous  account  of  that  wonderful  fact — the  trans 
formation  of  Judaism  which  was  an  exclusive  and  national 
religion,  into  Christianity,  which  was  a  catholic  and  all- 
embracing  one  ;  while  St.  Luke  gives  a  perfectly  natural 
one.  According  to  the  Tubingen  account,  Paul  not  only 
passes  with  startling  suddenness  from  the  persecution  of  the 
new  religion  to  the  adoption  of  it,  but  he  adopts  it  in  such  a 
way  as  to  incur  the  opposition  and  hatred  not  only  of  the  old 
friends  whom  he  was  forsaking,  but  of  all  the  previous  pro 
fessors  of  the  new  faith  which  he  was  joining.  We  are  to  look 
on  Paul  as  choosing  a  position  of  absolute  isolation.  We  are 
taught  to  believe  that  everything  implying  friendly  relations 
between  Paul  and  earlier  Christians  is  mere  invention  of  St. 
Luke.  There  is  no  truth,  it  is  said,  in  the  statement  that 
Barnabas  had  introduced  Paul  to  the  Jerusalem  Churches 
(Acts  ix.  27) ;  that  Barnabas  had  been  commissioned  by  the 
Jerusalem  Church  to  preach  at  Antioch  ;  that  it  was  in  con 
sequence  of  his  invitation  that  Paul  came  there  (xi.  22,  25) ; 
and  that  their  earlier  preaching  had  been  confined  to  Hellen 
ists.  Paul  had  from  the  first  struck  out  this  new  line  of 
preaching  to  heathen.  He  had  broken  completely  with  his- 
past,  given  up  his  Jewish  observances,  and  was,  in  consequence,, 
as  soon  as  his  practices  became  known,  hated  as  cordially  by 
Jews  who  owned  Jesus  to  be  the  Messiah  as  by  those  who 
rejected  Him.  And  yet  the  new  type  of  Christianity  intro 
duced  by  this  eccentric  convert  completely  supplanted  the 
old  one.  As  soon  as  the  new  religion  comes  under  the 
cognizance  of  the  historical  student,  we  find  the  Christian 
communities  in  every  town  constituting  parts  of  one  great 
corporation,  and  all  these  communities  of  the  type  invented 
by  Paul.  If  we  search  for  survivals  of  the  original  type  of 
Christianity,  we  can  find  nothing  making  pretensions  to  be 
so  regarded,  except,  in  one  little  corner,  a  few  Elkesaite 
heretics. 

All  this  is  truly  marvellous,  while  the  account  of  the 
canonical  writer  is  simple  and  natural.  Luke  knows  what 
modern  theorists  are  apt  to  forget,  that  this  champion  of  the 


XVIII.]     PROBABILITY  OF  THE  STORY  AS  TOLD  BY  LUKE.        333 

Gentiles  was  himself,  by  feeling  and  training,  a  Jew  of  the 
strictest  sort,  and  he  does  not  pretend  that  the  traces  of  such 
training  were  suddenly  obliterated.  Paul's  own  Epistles  show 
him  to  be  thoroughly  a  Jew,  loving  his  nation  with  such 
affection  as  even  to  be  able  to  wish  himself  anathema  from 
Christ  for  their  sake.  The  same  Epistles  confirm  Luke's 
account,  that  he  who  resisted  the  making  Jewish  observances 
obligatory  on  Gentiles  had  no  such  fanatical  hatred  of  them 
as  to  refuse  to  practise  them  himself.  'To  the  Jews,'  he 
says,  '  I  became  as  a  Jew,  that  I  might  gain  Jews ;  to  them 
that  are  under  the  law,  as  under  the  law,  not  being  myself 
under  the  law,  that  I  might  gain  them  that  are  under  the 
law '  (i  Cor.  ix.  20). 

And  here  let  me  say  in  passing  that  I  cannot  agree  with 
some  orthodox  interpreters  who  regard  the  part  which  Paul 
took  by  James's  advice  in  the  Nazarite's  vow  on  his  last  visit 
to  Jerusalem,  as  deceitful  on  his  part,  and  as  in  its  result  a 
failure.  St.  Luke's  representation  all  through  is,  that  though 
Paul  resisted  the  imposition  of  the  Mosaic  Law  on  Gentiles, 
he  did  not  forbid  the  practice  of  its  observance  by  Jews ;  and 
it  was  as  a  practical  proof  of  this  that  he  exhibited  himself  in 
the  Temple,  taking  part  in  a  Jewish  sacrifice.  Nor  do  I  see 
reason  to  regard  this  step  as  unsuccessful :  it  was  done  for  the 
satisfaction  of  the  Jewish  Christians,  of  whom  we  are  told 
there  were  many  thousands,  and  there  is  no  reason  to  suppose 
it  had  not  the  desired  effect.  It  was  unbelieving  Jews  from 
Asia  who  set  on  Paul,  and  raised  the  cry  that  he  had  intro 
duced  uncircumcised  persons  into  the  Temple. 

I  return  to  Luke's  history  of  the  admission  of  Gentiles  into 
the  Church.  This  is,  that  they  ordinarily  first  became  hearers 
of  the  word,  through  their  having  previously  so  inclined  to 
Judaism  as  to  frequent  the  Synagogue  worship  ;  and  then  that 
when  Gentile  converts  came  to  be  made  in  large  numbers, 
the  question,  Must  these  men  be  circumcised  before  they  can 
be  baptized  ?  came  up  as  a  practical  one,  and  was  decided  by 
Paul  in  the  negative.  Now  all  this  history  is  so  simple  and 
natural,  that  I  venture  to  say  that  if  this  were  Baur's  account, 
and  Baur's  had  been  Luke's,  Rationalist  critics  would  raise 
a  loud  outcry  against  the  reception  of  a  story  so  contrary  to 


334  THE   ACTS   OF   THE  APOSTLES.  [XVIII. 

historic  probability.  That  Paul's  relations  with  the  heads  of 
the  Jerusalem  Church  were  friendly,  whatever  might  have 
been  the  coolness  towards  him  of  inferior  members,  is  at 
tested  by  the  Epistle  to  the  Galatians,  which  tells  that  Peter 
was  the  object  of  Paul's  first  visit  to  Jerusalem  after  his  con 
version;  that  he  saw  James  on  the  same  occasion;  and  that 
these  Apostles  with  John  afterwards  formally  gave  him  the 
right  hand  of  fellowship,  and  divided  with  him  the  field  of 
labour.  The  same  Epistle  also  confirms  Luke's  account  that 
Barnabas  had  been  a  party  to  the  admission  of  Gentiles  on 
equal  terms  to  the  Church ;  for  when  afterwards,  under  the 
pressure  of  a  deputation  from  Jerusalem,  there  was  a  tem 
porary  abandonment  of  this  principle,  Paul  notes  with  sur 
prise,  as  the  climax  of  the  defection,  that  even  Barnabas 
should  have  been  carried  away. 

It  is  true  that  there  is  only  one  passage  in  Paul's  speeches 
in  the  Acts  where  the  doctrine  of  justification  by  faith  without 
the  deeds  of  the  law  is  prominently  dwelt  on.  I  mean  Acts 
xiii.  39:  'By  him  all  that  believe  are  justified  from  all  things 
from  which  ye  could  not  be  justified  by  the  law  of  Moses.' 
And  perhaps  we  may  add  xxvi.  18.  But  then  it  must  be 
remembered  that  Paul  is  a  character  in  real  life,  and  not  a 
character  in  a  play.  In  a  play  it  is  a  common  device  to  put 
into  the  mouth  of  a  character  some  pet  phrase  which  he  is- 
always  repeating,  and  by  which  the  audience  learn  to  recog 
nize  him.  If  the  author  of  the  Acts  had  not  been  a  real 
companion  of  Paul,  but  a  literary  man  who  made  Paul  the 
hero  of  his  story,  our  modern  objectors  show  us  how  the 
work  would  probably  have  been  done.  The  Apostle's  Epistles 
show  how  earnestly  he  contended  for  the  doctrine  of  justi 
fication  by  faith  without  the  works  of  the  law;  and  so 
phrases  insisting  on  this  doctrine  would  have  been  tagged 
on  to  all  his  speeches.  But  in  real  life  a  man  whose  career 
is  not  very  short  has  many  battles  to  fight,  and  the  contro 
versies  in  which  at  one  time  he  takes  an  earnest  part  often 
die  out  before  his  life-work  is  finished.  These  controversies 
with  Judaizing  Christians  form  the  chief  topics  of  four  Epis 
tles  all  written  at  the  same  period  of  Paul's  life,  namely,  to 
the  Romans,  to  the  Galatians,  and  the  two  to  the  Corinthians. 


XVIII.]       THE  PARALLEL  BETWEEN  PETER  AND  PAUL.  335 

But  these  topics  are  nearly  as  absent  from  the  other  Epistles* 
as  they  are  from  the  speeches  in  the  Acts.  In  these  last, 
where  he  is  addressing  audiences  of  unbelievers,  his  subject 
naturally  is  the  Messiahship  of  Jesus,  and  the  truth  of  His 
Resurrection.  On  the  whole,  I  conclude  that  we  are  not 
justified  in  tearing  so  homogeneous  a  book  as  the  Acts  in 
pieces  on  either  of  the  grounds  alleged  :  that  is  to  say, 
neither  because  the  book  tells  of  miracles,  nor  because  it 
gives  an  untrue  representation  of  the  life  and  work  of  Paul. 

On  another  ground  the  book  has  been  alleged  to  betray 
that  it  is  not  a  real  history,  but  a  story  made  up  to  serve  a 
purpose.  It  is  said  that  the  compiler,  whose  object  was  to 
reconcile  the  Petrine  and  Pauline  parties  in  the  Church,  put 
his  materials  together,  with  the  view  of  drawing  a  parallel 
between  Peter  and  Paul,  and  asserting  their  equality.  If 
Peter  is  miraculously  released  by  an  angel  from  prison,  when 
his  life  was  threatened  by  Herod,  Paul  must  be  miraculously 
released  at  Philippi.  If  Peter  strikes  Ananias  and  Sapphira 
dead,  Paul  works  a  similar  miracle  on  Elymas  the  sorcerer. 
And  again,  Paul's  contest  with  Elymas  is  said  to  have  been 
intended  as  a  parallel  to  Peter's  contest  with  Simon  Magus. f 
Peter  has  worship  offered  him  by  Cornelius ;  the  people  of 
Lystra  are  on  the  point  of  sacrificing  to  Paul,  and  the  people 
of  Melita  call  him  a  god.  If  sick  persons  are  healed  because 
the  shadow  of  Peter  fell  on  them,  from  the  body  of  Paul  there 
are  brought  to  the  sick  handkerchiefs  and  aprons,  and  they 
recover.  And,  as  I  have  already  said,  Paul's  great  work  of 
preaching  to  the  Gentiles  has  not  only  its  counterpart,  but 
its  anticipation,  in  Peter's  conversion  of  Cornelius. 

That  a  certain  parallelism  exists  in  the  history  of  the  Acts 
between  Peter  and  Paul  need  not  be  denied.  The  only  ques 
tion  is  whether  this  was  a  parallelism  existing  in  fact,  or  one 
invented  by  the  narrator.  In  all  true  history  we  have  nume 
rous  parallelisms.  I  barely  allude  to  Plutarch's  attempt  to 

*  Phil.  iii.  9  is  nearly  the  only  instance  of  their  introduction. 

t  '  Paul's  encounter  with  Elymas  the  sorcerer  in  Paphos  is  similar  to 
Peter's  with  Simon  Magus.  The  punishment  inflicted  upon  him  resembles 
Paul's  own  blindness  at  the  time  of  conversion ;  and  thus  the  occurrence 
is  fictitious'  (Davidson,  ii.  128).  This  '  thus'  is  beautiful. 


33^  THE   ACTS   OF   THE   APOSTLES.  [XVIII. 

find  in  the  life  of  each  Roman  worthy  a  parallel  to  the  history 
of  some  Grecian  great  man.  On  the  principles  of  criticism 
by  which  the  Acts  have  been  judged,  the  history  of  France 
for  the  first  half  of  this  century  and  the  last  years  of  the 
century  preceding,  ought  to  be  rejected  as  but  an  attempt  to 
make  a  parallel  to  the  history  of  England  one  hundred  and 
fifty  years  before.  Both  stories  tell  of  a  revolution,  of  the 
beheading  of  a  king,  of  the  foundation  of  a  republic,  suc 
ceeded  by  a  military  despotism,  and  ending  with  the  restora 
tion  of  the  exiled  family.  In  both  cases  the  restored  family 
misgoverns,  and  the  king  is  again  dethroned ;  but  this  time  a 
republic  is  not  founded,  neither  is  the  king  put  to  death ;  but 
he  retires  into  exile,  and  is  replaced  by  a  kinsman  who  suc 
ceeds,  on  different  terms,  to  the  vacated  throne. 

The  attempt  to  account  for  the  book  of  the  Acts  as  written 
for  the  sake  of  making  a  parallelism  between  Peter  and  Paul, 
and  to  find  a  purpose  for  every  narration  included  in  the 
book,  completely  breaks  down.  It  would  only  be  a  waste  of 
time  if  I  were  to  tell  you  of  the  far-fetched  explanations  that 
have  been  given  as  to  the  purpose  why  certain  stories  were 
introduced ;  and  I  shall  presently  offer  what  seems  to  be  a 
much  simpler  explanation  of  the  choice  of  topics.  But  what 
I  think  proves  decisively  that  the  making  a  parallel  between 
Peter  and  Paul  was  not  an  idea  present  to  the  author's  mind, 
is  the  absence  of  the  natural  climax  of  such  a  parallel — the 
story  of  the  martyrdom  of  both  the  Apostles.  Very  early 
tradition  makes  both  Peter  and  Paul  close  their  lives  by 
martyrdom  at  Rome  —  the  place  where  Rationalist  critics 
generally  believe  the  Acts  to  have  been  written.  The 
stories  told  in  tolerably  ancient  times  in  that  Church  which 
venerated  with  equal  honour  the  memory  of  either  Apostle, 
represented  both  as  joined  in  harmonious  resistance  to  the 
impostures  of  Simon  Magus.  And  though  I  believe  these 
stones  to  be  more  modern  than  the  latest  period  to  which 
anyone  has  ventured  to  assign  the  Acts,  yet  what  an  oppor 
tunity  did  that  part  of  the  story,  which  is  certainly  ancient 
— that  both  Apostles  came  to  Rome  and  died  there  for  the 
faith  (Clem.  Rom.  5) — offer  to  anyone  desirous  of  blotting 
out  the  memory  of  all  differences  between  the  preaching  of 


XVIII.]      DISAPPOINTING   TERMINATION   OF   THE   ACTS.          337 

Peter  and  Paul,  and  of  setting  both  on  equal  pedestals  of 
honour?  Just  as  the  names  of  Ridley  and  Latimer  have 
been  united  in  the  memory  of  the  Church  of  England,  and 
no  count  has  been  taken  of  their  previous  doctrinal  differ 
ences,  in  the  recollection  of  their  joint  testimony  for  their 
common  faith,  so  have  the  names  of  Peter  and  Paul  been 
constantly  bound  together  by  the  fact  that  the  martyrdoms 
of  both  have  been  commemorated  on  the  same  day.  And 
if  the  object  of  the  author  of  the  Acts  had  been  what  has 
been  supposed,  it  is  scarcely  credible  that  he  could  have 
missed  so  obvious  an  opportunity  of  bringing  his  book  to 
its  most  worthy  conclusion,  by  telling  how  the  two  servants 
of  Christ — all  previous  differences,  if  there  had  been  any, 
reconciled  and  forgotten — joined  in  witnessing  a  good  con 
fession  before  the  tyrant  emperor,  and  encouraged  each  other 
to  steadfastness  in  endurance  to  the  end. 

The  absence  of  this  natural  termination  to  the  book  of  the 
Acts,  while  it  is  absolutely  fatal  to  the  theory  on  which  I 
have  been  commenting,  is  indeed  hard  to  explain  on  any 
theory  which  assigns  a  late  date  to  the  book.  Every  reader 
feels  some  disappointment  at  the  story  being  prematurely 
broken  off;  and  as  I  have  already  mentioned,  this  was  one 
of  the  things  which  the  author  of  the  Muratorian  Fragment 
tried  to  account  for.  We  hear  of  Paul  being  brought  to 
Rome,  to  plead  his  cause  before  the  Emperor.  It  is  un 
satisfactory  merely  to  be  given  to  understand  that  for  two 
years  he  got  no  hearing.  We  ask,  What  happened  after 
that  ?  Was  the  Apostle  then  condemned,  or  was  he  set  at 
liberty  ?  and  if  so,  did  he  carry  out  his  once  expressed  in 
tention  of  preaching  the  Gospel  in  Spain,  or  did  he  return 
to  visit  the  Churches  which  he  had  previously  planted  ?  And 
are  we  to  believe  the  story  that  he  came  a  second  time  be 
fore  the  Roman  tribunal,  and  closed  his  life  by  martyrdom  ? 
The  connexion  of  St.  Peter,  too,  with  the  Roman  Church,  is 
a  subject  on  which  we  should  wish  to  have  some  authentic 
information. 

To  my  mind  the  simplest  explanation  why  St.  Luke  has 
told  us  no  more  is,  that  he  knew  no  more  ;  and  that  he  knew 
no  more,  because  at  the  time  nothing  more  had  happened — 

z 


338  THE   ACTS    OF   THE   APOSTLES.  [XVIII. 

in  other  words,  that  the  book  of  the  Acts  was  written  a  little 
more  than  two  years  after  Paul's  arrival  in  Rome.  To  this 
two  principal  objections  are  made — (i)  that  the  earlier  book, 
the  Gospel,  must  have  been  written  after  the  destruction  of 
Jerusalem,  which  it  distinctly  predicts ;  and  (2)  that  the  Acts 
itself  contains  (xx.  25)  a  prediction  that  Paul  should  not 
return  to  Ephesus :  a  prediction  which,  it  is  supposed,  the 
writer  would  not  have  inserted  unless  he  had  known  that 
Paul's  life  had  ended  without  any  return  to  Asia  Minor.  On 
the  latter  objection  I  shall  have  more  to  say  when  I  come 
to  treat  of  the  Pastoral  Epistles  ;  and  neither  objection  makes 
the  same  impression  on  me  as  on  those  who  believe  prophecy 
to  be  impossible.  I  am  aware,  however,  that  some  very  good 
and  orthodox  critics  assign  the  book  a  later  date,  and  consider 
that  the  account  of  the  Gospel  message  preached  by  Paul  at  the 
capital  of  the  civilized  world  is  a  sufficient  close  and  climax  to 
the  history.  But  unless  we  suppose  that  St.  Luke  projected 
a  third  work,  which  he  did  not  live  to  execute,  I  find  it  hard 
to  explain  his  silence  as  to  the  deeply  interesting  period  of 
Church  history  which  followed  Paul's  arrival  at  Rome,  in  any 
other  way  than  by  assigning  a  very  early  date  to  the  book. 

I  have  already  said  that  the  explanations  completely  break 
down  which  try  to  find  some  purpose  in  St.  Luke's  selection 
of  topics  in  the  Acts ;  and  I  need  not  tell  you,  for  example, 
what  far-fetched  reasons  have  been  given  for  the  introduction 
of  the  Acts  of  the  deacons,  the  account  of  the  martyrdom  of 
Stephen,  the  history  of  Philip  and  the  Ethiopian  eunuch,  and 
soforth.  The  Muratorian  Fragment  explains  Luke's  principle 
of  selection  to  be,  that  he  tells  of  the  things  he  had  witnessed 
himself;  and  I  believe  that  if  you  add  to  this,  c  or  of  which  he 
had  the  opportunity  of  hearing  from  eyewitnesses,'  you  will 
have  the  true  explanation.  So  Luke  tells  in  the  preface  to 
his  Gospel  how  he  made  it  his  business  to  trace  everything 
from  the  very  first ;  and  the  Acts  show  what  opportunities  he 
had  of  gaining  information.  If,  for  instance,  we  read  the  8th 
chapter  of  the  Acts  in  connexion  with  the  2ist,  which  tells  of 
several  days  which  Luke  spent  in  Philip's  house,  we  have 
decisive  proof  that  the  companion  of  Paul's  travels  was  also 
the  compiler  of  the  early  history.  To  account  for  the  inser- 


XVIII.]      PHILIP  THE  DEACON  AND  PHILIP  THE  APOSTLE.      339 

tion  of  the  8th  chapter,  I  know  no  other  way  which  is  not 
forced  in  the  extreme ;  while  nothing  can  be  more  natural 
than  that  a  visitor  of  Philip's,  who  was  making  it  his  business 
to  gather  authentic  records  of  the  Apostles'  labours,  should 
be  glad  to  include  in  his  collection  a  narrative  so  interesting, 
communicated  to  him  by  the  very  lips  of  a  principal  actor. 

The  account  which  the  Acts  give  of  this  Philip  may,  I 
think,  be  regarded  as  proof  of  the  antiquity  of  the  book.  For 
the  name  of  Philip  has  an  important  place  in  early  ecclesias 
tical  tradition.  There  is  quite  satisfactory  evidence  that  a 
Christian  teacher  of  this  name  early  settled  in  Hierapolis,  that 
he  came  to  be  known  in  Asia  Minor  as  Philip  the  Apostle, 
and  that  daughters  of  his  were  believed  to  have  the  gift  of 
prophecy,  and  were  regarded  with  high  veneration.  Papias 
(Euseb.  iii.  39)  speaks  of  these  daughters,  and  represents  some 
of  the  traditions  which  he  records  as  resting  on  their  autho 
rity.  Clement  of  Alexandria  (Strom,  iii.  6,  and  see  Euseb. 
iii.  30)  says  that  Philip  the  Apostle  had  daughters  whom  he 
gave  in  marriage  to  husbands.  Polycrates  of  Ephesus  (Euseb. 
v.  24)  states  that  Philip,  one  of  the  Twelve,  had  two  daughters 
who  remained  virgins  to  old  age,  and  who  died  at  Hierapolis; 
and  a  third  daughter  who  had  walked  in  the  Holy  Spirit,  and 
who  rested  at  Ephesus.  If  we  are  to  lay  stress  on  Clement's 
plural  number,  and  to  infer  that  Philip  had  more  married 
daughters  than  one,  then,  since  he  had  two  who  did  not 
marry,  we  must  conclude  that  he  had  at  least  four  daughters. 
In  the  dialogue  between  Caius  and  Proclus,  written  at  the 
very  beginning  of  the  third  century,  the  Montanist  interlo 
cutor  Proclus  speaks  of  four  prophetesses,  daughters  of  Philip, 
whose  tomb  was  still  at  Hierapolis,  and  that  of  their  father 
as  well  (Euseb.  iii.  3 1 ).  There  can  be  little  doubt  that  Proclus 
identified  the  Philip  of  Hierapolis  with  the  Philip  of  the  Acts, 
as  Eusebius  expressly  does.  Whether  they  were  right  in 
doing  so  is  a  question  which  cannot  be  confidently  answered. 
The  Philip  of  the  Acts  lived  at  Caesarea,  and  is  described  as 
one  of  the  Seven ;  the  other  Philip  lived  at  Hierapolis,  and 
was  regarded  as  one  of  the  Twelve.  It  is  quite  possible  that 
two  different  Philips  might  each  have  four  daughters  ;  yet  the 
simplest  way  of  explaining  the  facts  seems  to  be  that  the 

Z2 


34<>  THE    ACTS    OF   THE   APOSTLES.  [XVIII. 

Philip  of  the  Acts,  subsequently  to  Luke's  visit,  removed 
from  Palestine  to  Asia  Minor ;  *  and  certainly  it  seems  more 
probable  that  the  Hellenist  Philip  should  so  migrate  than  the 
Apostle,  who  presumably  was  a  Hebrew.  We  can  believe, 
then,  that  in  process  of  time  the  veneration  given  Philip  as 
a  member  of  the  Apostolic  company  caused  him  to  be  known 
as  an  Apostle — a  name  which  in  early  times  had  various  ap 
plications,  as  I  shall  afterwards  have  occasion  to  remark — 
and  eventually  to  be  popularly  identified  with  his  namesake 
of  the  Twelve.  Of  the  four  daughters  who  were  unmarried 
at  the  time  of  Luke's  visit,  two  may  afterwards  have  married, 
and  one  of  these  may  have  died  early,  or  otherwise  passed  out 
of  sight. 

If  the  Philip  of  Hierapolis  was  really  not  an  Apostle,  it  is 
needless  to  say  what  a  stamp  of  antiquity  the  knowledge  of 
this  fact  puts  upon  Luke's  book.  But  at  present  I  am  not 
concerned  with  the  question  whether  Philip  the  deacon  after 
wards  went  to  Hierapolis.  I  am  merely  pointing  out  that 
Luke's  intercourse  with  him  accounts  for  the  insertion  of 
some  sections  in  the  Acts.  We  are  distinctly  told  of  '  many 
days'  of  such  intercourse,  but  it  is  likely  that  there  was 
a  great  deal  more.  Paul  was  for  two  years  a  prisoner 
at  Csesarea  ;  and  as  Luke  had  been  his  companion  in  his 
journey  to  Jerusalem,  and  was  afterwards  his  companion 
in  his  journey  to  Rome,  it  is  likely  that  they  were  much 
together  in  the  intervening  time,  and  therefore  that  Luke 
at  Caesarea  would  constantly  see  Philip.  He  would  there 
hear  from  him  of  his  mission  to  Samaria,  and  of  the  subse 
quent  mission  thither  of  Peter  and  John.  He  would  also 
hear  from  him  of  the  appointment  of  the  Seven,  of  whom 
Philip  had  been  one  ;  and  no  doubt  he  would  learn  much 
from  the  same  authority  of  the  most  distinguished  member 
of  the  Seven,  Stephen,  and  of  his  glorious  martyrdom.  At 
Caesarea  Luke  may  very  possibly  have  met  Cornelius  ;  and  in 
any  case  he  would  be  sure  to  hear  there  of  the  remarkable 
step  taken  in  his  case  by  Peter. 

*  That  this  became  the  received  opinion  may  be  gathered  from  the  fact 
that,  in  Jerome's  time,  they  showed  at  Caesarea  the  chambers  of  the  four 
daughters,  not  the  tombs  (Ep.  108,  ad  Eustochium). 


XVIII.]        POSSIBLE   USE   OF   TRAVELLING   MEMORANDA.        34! 

Among  the  sources  used  by  Luke,  I  see  no  objection  to 
include  travelling  memoranda  made  by  himself ;  for  though 
I  quite  disbelieve  the  myth  of  a  journal  of  Paul's  companion 
having  fallen  into  the  hands  of  an  unknown  person  in  the 
next  century,  such  a  journal  might  easily  have  been  preserved 
and  used  by  the  writer ;  and  the  exact  details  we  meet  with 
in  the  account  of  Paul's  last  journey  to  Jerusalem,  and  his 
voyage  to  Rome,  have  quite  the  air  of  a  narrative  made  from 
a  diary.  This  supposition  will  at  least  serve  to  answer  some 
frivolous  objections  made  to  the  '  we'  sections  from  their 
inequality  of  treatment.  In  one  place  it  is  said  they  give  a 
mere  list  of  names.  We  took  Paul  in  at  Assos,  and  came  to 
Mitylene,  and  came  the  next  day  over  against  Chios,  and  the 
next  day  we  touched  at  Samos,  and  the  day  after  arrived  at 
Miletus.  Then  there  will  be  a  pretty  full  account.  Then  the 
whole  details  of  the  shipwreck  are  given,  but  of  the  three 
months  at  Melita  scarcely  anything  is  told.  But  anyone  who 
has  kept  travelling  memoranda  knows  that  this  is  exactly  the 
kind  of  thing  they  are  apt  to  be ;  where  nothing  interesting 
occurred,  only  a  bare  register  of  the  places  where  the  night 
was  spent ;  then  perhaps  some  record  of  greater  length,  and 
after  the  journey  is  for  the  time  over,  and  the  traveller  settled 
down  in  a  place,  no  entry  made  at  all.*  On  the  whole,  I 
consider  that  a  study  of  the  choice  of  topics  in  the  Acts  leads 
to  a  conviction  both  of  the  unity  of  authorship,  and  also  of 
the  author's  care  to  write  only  of  things  concerning  which  he 
had  full  means  of  information. 

I  come  next  to  mention  another  consideration  from  which 
the  antiquity  of  the  book  of  the  Acts  may  fairly  be  inferred. 

*  Objections  made  by  Baur  to  the  credibility  of  the  story  told  in  the  last 
verses  of  the  Acts  have  been  repeated  by  his  followers,  but  to  me  seem 
very  unreasonable.  The  story  is,  that  Paul,  anxious  to  learn  whether,  on 
his  trial  before  the  emperor,  his  release  will  be  opposed  by  the  heads  of  the 
Jewish  community  at  Rome,  puts  himself  in  communication  with  them. 
He  finds  that  during  the  long  interval  that  had  elapsed  since  his  arrest,  the 
rulers  at  Jerusalem  had  let  him  drop  out  of  sight.  They  had  given  no  com 
mission  against  him,  either  by  letter  or  message,  to  their  friends  at  Rome. 
But  though  these  last  had  heard  nothing  against  Paul  personally,  they  had 
heard  much  against  his  religion.  He  begs  to  be  allowed  to  speak  in  its 
defence,  and  gets  a  hearing  accordingly.  But  the  result  is,  that  though  he 
makes  a  favourable  impression  on  a  few,  the  greater  part  go  away  uncon 
vinced.  This  story  seems  to  me  to  bear  the  stamp  of  simple  truth. 


342  THE   ACTS    OF    THE   APOSTLES.  [XVIII. 

First  let  me  premise  that  we  may  take  it  as  acknowledged, 
that  if  the  compiler  of  the  Acts  was  not  Paul's  travelling 
companion,  he  was  at  least  a  Paulinist,  well  acquainted  with 
his  master's  manner.  The  vocabulary  of  Paul's  speeches  in 
the  Acts  has  been  compared  with  that  of  Paul's  Epistles,  the 
result  being  to  extort  the  confession  from  an  unfriendly  critic 
that  the  author  of  the  Acts  was  undoubtedly  familiar  with  the 
Pauline  diction.*  It  has  been  attempted  to  extenuate  the 
force  of  this  concession  by  an  attempted  proof  that  the 
Pauline  speeches  in  the  Acts  also  contain  many  of  Luke's 
favourite  words.  It  is  owned,  however,  that  this  cannot  be 
said  of  all  the  Pauline  speeches.  Thus,  with  regard  to  Paul's 
speech  at  Athens,  Davidson  says,  'It  must  be  confessed,  how 
ever,  that  the  discourse  contains  many  peculiar  expressions, 
there  being  no  less  than  twenty-six  words  in  19-34  which  do 
not  occur  in  Luke ;'  and  his  conclusion  about  this  speech  is, 
*  We  think  that  it  is  the  speaker's  to  a  considerable  extent. 
It  is  in  harmony  with  the  First  Epistle  to  the  Thessalonians, 
and  if  it  be  a  condensed  summary  of  many  addresses,  the 
sentiments  and  part  of  the  language  are  probably  Paul's 'f 
(Davidson,  ii.  109). 

*  The  following  is  Davidson's  abstract  of  the  results  of  Lekebusch's 
study  of  Paul's  speech  to  the  Ephesian  Elders  at  Miletus.  I  copy  it  chiefly 
for  the  sake  of  the  concluding  sentence,  in  order  to  show  how  such  evidence 
is  met  by  a  hostile  critic.  The  list  of  instances  given  might  easily  be 
amended  by  striking  out  two  or  three  of  no  great  force,  and  adding  others. 
'  8ov\eveiv  T$  Kvpiy,  Acts  xx.  19,  six  times  in  Paul,  only  in  Matt.  vi.  24,. 
Luke  xvi.  13  besides;  rairfivo^poffvvT],  xx.  19,  five  times  in  Paul,  only  in 
I  Peter  v.  5  besides  ;  viroffrf\\ca,  xx.  20,  Gal.  ii.  12  ;  rb  ffv^fpov,  xx.  2Or 
three  times  in  i  Cor.,  onlyinHeb.  xii.  20 besides  ;  Siaitovia,  xx.  24,  twenty- 
two  times  in  Paul;  paprvponai, xx.  26,  Gal.v.  3,  Eph.  iv.  17  ;  KaOapbs  eyri, 
xx.  26,  Acts  xviii.  6  ;  ^efSo^uat,  xx.  29,  seven  times  in  Paul,  only  in  2  Pet. 
ii.  4,  5  besides ;  vovQeriiv,  xx.  31,  seven  times  in  Paul ;  eTroi/coSo^ueiV,  xx.  32, 
six  times  in  Paul,  only  in  Jude  20  besides  ;  Koiriav,  active,  xx.  35,  thirteen 
times  in  Paul;  the  hortative  ypyyopc'iTf,  xx.  31,  I  Cor.  xvi.  13.  Thesemay 
show  nothing  more  than  a  writer  familiar  with  the  Pauline  diction,  as  the 
author  of  the  Acts  undoubtedly  was  '  (Davidson,  ii.  112). 

t  It  must  be  observed  that  this  speech  does  not  occur  in  one  of  the  '  we* 
sections,  so  that  if  it  be  a  genuine  specimen  of  Paul's  preaching,  the 
hypothesis  that  the  compiler  of  the  Acts  somehow  got  possession  of  a 
journal  kept  by  Paul's  travelling  companion,  has  to  be  supplemented  by  a 
further  hypothesis  that  he  also  got  possession  of  other  genuine  records  of 
Paul's  preaching.  This  speech  has  a  character  corresponding  to  Paul's 
education.  Tarsus  was  the  central  university  town  for  Cilicia  and  Cyprus, 
and  was  so  famous  that  even  Romans  esteemed  it.  This  country  was  the 


xvin.]        LUKE'S  REPORT  OF  PAUL'S  SPEECHES.  343 

Now,  with  regard  to  the  attempt  to  find  traces  of  Luke's 
hand  in  the  report  of  other  speeches  of  Paul,  let  me  remark 
that,  admitting  the  attempt  to  be  successful,  the  inference 
that  follows  is  exactly  the  opposite  of  what  is  supposed. 
Let  us  concede  that  Luke  had  a  monopoly  of  his  favourite  ex 
pressions,  and  that  if  we  find  one  of  them  in  a  report  of  Paul's 
speeches,  we  are  entitled  to  conclude  that  Paul  never  uttered 
that  expression  ;  still  if  the  speech  in  the  main  contains  Paul's 
sentiments,  and  Paul's  language,  we  are  bound  to  believe  that 
the  other  person  who  has  left  traces  of  his  hand  must  be  the 
person  who  heard  and  reported  the  speech.  We  can  easily 
believe  that  the  hearer  of  a  speech,  when  he  afterwards  came 
to  write  it  down  from  memory,  might,  while  giving  the  sub 
stance  correctly,  introduce  a  little  of  his  own  phraseology  ; 
but  we  may  be  sure  that  if  a  compiler  of  the  next  generation 
got  possession  of  a  genuine  report  of  speeches  of  Paul  he 
would  incorporate  them  in  his  work  verbatim.  Thus,  in  my 
opinion,  if  it  be  once  acknowledged  that  the  report  of  Paul's 
speeches  in  the  Acts  exhibits  familiarity  with  the  Pauline 
diction,  a  real  proof  that  these  speeches,  before  being  written 
down  as  we  have  them,  had  passed  through  the  mind  of  the 
compiler  of  the  Acts,  would  go  to  confirm  the  traditional 
opinion  that  this  compiler  had  been  a  companion  and  hearer 
of  St.  Paul.  I  may  add,  in  confirmation  of  this  result,  that 
Alford  has  remarked  that  the  speech  (Acts  xxii.),  which  was 
spoken  in  Hebrew  contains  no  Pauline  expression,  while  it 
abounds  in  those  peculiar  to  St.  Luke  ;  on  the  other  hand, 
the  speech  (Acts  xvii.),  which  Luke  does  not  profess  to 
have  heard  himself,  contains  none  of  Luke's  characteristic 
phrases. 

But  now  I  come  to  the  point  at  which  I  was  desirous  to 
arrive.  If  it  is  owned  that  the  compiler  of  the  Acts  was  a 
Paulinist,  '  undoubtedly  familiar  with  the  Pauline  diction,' 

cradle  of  Stoicism.  Amongst  the  Stoic  teachers  which  it  supplied  were 
Zeno  of  Cyprus,  Persseus  of  Cyprus,  Chrysippus  of  Soli,  and  Aratus  of 
Soli,  who  is  quoted  in  the  speech.  Paul,  therefore,  had  been  brought  up 
in  a  Stoic  atmosphere  ;  and  in  the  speech  he  takes  the  Stoic  side  against 
the  Epicureans,  in  their  doctrine  about  Providence,  about  the  unity  of 
nature  of  all  nations  (v.  26),  and  about  Pantheism,  all  that  is  true  in  which 
is  recognized  (v.  28). 


344  THE  ACTS   OF   THE  APOSTLES.  [XVIII. 

we  ask  how  he  acquired  that  familiarity.  If  it  was  not  from 
personal  intercourse  with  the  Apostle,  it  must  have  been  from 
diligent  study  of  his  Epistles,  and  such  study  a  Paulinist  of 
the  next  generation  could  not  fail  to  give.  But  the  strange 
point  is,  that  no  satisfactory  proof  can  be  made  out  that  the 
author  of  the  Acts  had  ever  seen  St.  Paul's  Epistles.  If  we 
were  to  borrow  our  opponents'  language,  we  might  say  that 
St.  Luke  absolutely  'knew  nothing'  of  these  letters.  We  can 
find  in  the  Epistle  to  the  Hebrews,  and  in  i  Peter,  clear 
proofs  of  acquaintance  with  Paul's  letters  ;  but  not  so  in  the 
Acts.  Can  we  imagine  a  compiler  of  the  next  century  so 
subtle  as  to  give  the  speeches  which  he  puts  in  Paul's  mouth 
a  Pauline  character,  by  employing  that  Apostle's  vocabulary, 
and  yet  avoiding  anything  like  a  direct  echo  of  any  passage  in 
the  Epistles  ?  The  nearest  coincidence  I  can  find  is  that  in 
the  speech  at  Athens,  Paul  says  (xvii.  31),  'He  will  judge 
the  world  in  righteousness  by  that  man  whom  He  hath 
ordained,  whereof  He  hath  given  assurance  unto  all  men  in 
that  He  hath  raised  Him  from  the  dead.'  This  is  like  what 
Paul  says  in  the  beginning  of  the  Epistle  to  the  Romans  (i.  4), 
'  Declared  to  be  the  Son  of  God  with  power,  according  to  the 
spirit  of  holiness,  by  the  resurrection  from  the  dead  :'  so  like 
at  least  that  we  can  easily  believe  both  to  have  been  utter 
ances  of  the  same  man  ;  yet  the  likeness  is  certainly  not  that 
of  direct  imitation.  If  the  antiquity  of  the  book  of  Acts  were 
undoubted,  and  that  of  Paul's  Epistles  disputed,  I  am  per 
suaded  that  our  opponents  would  not  admit  the  validity  of 
a  single  proof  we  could  produce  of  St.  Luke's  acquaintance 
with  those  Epistles,  while  they  could  make  out  a  very  strong 
case  to  prove  his  ignorance. 

For  example,  Philippi  is  a  place  where,  as  I  already  re 
marked,  the  author  of  the  '  we '  sections  spent  a  considerable 
time  ;  and  its  Church  would,  therefore,  be  one  in  which  he 
would  take  a  lively  interest.  Yet  he  shows  no  sign  of 
acquaintance  with  the  letter  which,  at  a  period  a  little  later 
than  that  included  in  the  history  of  the  Acts,  Paul  wrote  to 
the  Philippian  Church.  In  the  account  given  in  the  Acts  of 
the  formation  of  that  Church,  Lydia  is  the  only  person  men 
tioned  by  name.  If  the  Epistle  had  been  forged  by  anyone 


xviii.]      PAUL'S  EPISTLES  NOT  USED  IN  THE  ACTS.         345 

who  had  seen  the  Acts,  that  name  would  surely  have  been 
found  in  it ;  but  it  is  absent.  On  the  other  hand,  there  is  not 
a  word  in  the  Acts  about  Epaphroditus,  about  the  women 
Euodia  and  Syntyche,  about  the  name  Clement,  afterwards  so 
celebrated,  about  the  gifts  of  money  sent  by  the  Philippian 
Church  to  Paul  at  Thessalonica  (Phil.  iv.  16;  see  also  2  Cor. 
xi.  9).*  Thus  the  independence  of  the  Acts  and  this  Epistle 
is  clearly  marked ;  but  at  what  an  early  date  must  each 
writing  have  been  composed,  if  the  author  of  neither  had 
seen  the  other? 

Take  again  the  Epistle  to  the  Galatians.  The  main  topic 
of  the  assailants  of  the  Acts  is  the  assertion  that  the  book 
contradicts  that  Epistle.  I  do  not  admit  that  there  is  any 
real  contradiction,  but  I  think  also  that  St.  Luke  when  he 
wrote  had  not  seen  that  Epistle.  There  are  some  things 
mentioned  in  it,  such  as  Paul's  journey  to  Arabia,  the  rebuke 
of  Paul  to  Peter  at  Antioch,  the  dispute  concerning  the  cir 
cumcision  of  Titus,  which  I  think  St.  Luke  would  scarcely  have 
passed  over  in  silence  had  he  known  that  Epistle.  Now  a 
writer  of  the  second  century  could  neither  have  been  ignorant 
of  that  Epistle  himself,  nor  could  he  flatter  himself  that  his 
readers  could  be  so.  Thus  the  excuse  will  not  serve  that  he 
omitted  these  things  in  order  to  conceal  from  his  readers  that 
there  ever  had  been  any  variance  between  Paul  and  the  original 
Apostles.  If  that  had  been  his  object,  he  would  have  repeated 
the  same  stories  with  some  different  colouring ;  but  he  would 
not  have  resorted  to  the  ostrich-like  device  of  being  silent 
about  things  told  in  a  book  which  he  knew  his  readers  had  in 
their  hands.  But  while  I  find  it  hard  to  think  that  the  author  of 
the  Acts  could  have  been  acquainted  with  the  Epistle  to  the 
Galatians,  I  see  no  difficulty  in  the  supposition  that  he  was 
ignorant  of  it.  If  Luke  had  not  been  with  Paul  at  the  time 
he  wrote  that  letter,  then  unless  Paul  kept  a  copy  of  it,  or 
unless  the  Galatian  Church  sent  him  back  a  copy  of  his  own 

*  Bishop  FitzGerald  used  to  think  there  was  an  oblique  reference  to  the 
Macedonian  gifts  in  awfixero  r<$  Xoyy  (Acts  xviii.  5) ;  the  meaning  being 
that  these  gifts  freed  Paul  from  the  necessity  of  working  at  his  trade,  and 
enabled  him  to  devote  himself  entirely  to  the  preaching  of  the  word.  Canon 
Cook  gives  the  same  explanation  in  the  Speaker's  Commentary. 


THE  ACTS  OF  THE   APOSTLES.  [XVIII. 

letter,  one  of  Paul's  immediate  companions  was  just  one  of 
the  last  persons  in  the  Church  to  be  likely  to  see  it. 

Again,  it  seems  to  me  probable  that  Luke,  when  he  wrote, 
had  not  seen  the  Epistles  to  the  Corinthians.  Surely  if  he 
had  read  i  Cor.  xv.  6,  7,  his  Gospel  would  have  told  some 
thing  of  our  Lord's  appearance  to  James  and  to  the  five 
hundred  brethren  at  once ;  and  if  he  had  read  2  Cor.  xi.  24, 
25,  the  Acts  would  have  given  some  particulars  about  the  five 
times  when  in  the  synagogue  Paul  received  forty  stripes  save 
one,  of  the  three  beatings  with  rods,  and  the  three  shipwrecks. 
In  the  case  of  i  Cor.,  however,  we  have  the  strongest  token 
that  has  been  found  of  indebtedness  on  Luke's  part  to 
Pauline  epistles,  viz.  the  close  resemblance  between  the 
words  in  which  the  institution  of  the  Eucharist  is  recorded 
in  that  Epistle  and  in  the  Gospel.  I  am  myself  inclined  to 
explain  that  resemblance  by  the  liturgical  use  of  the  words. 
Luke  would  probably  have  often  heard  Paul  when  conducting 
divine  service  recite  the  words  of  Institution,  and  so  they 
would  come  into  his  Gospel  in  the  same  form.  One  other 
phrase  is  cited,  '  Whatsoever  is  set  before  you  eat '  (i  Cor.  x. 
27),  which  nearly  coincides  with  the  words  in  the  direction  to 
the  Seventy  (Luke  x.  8),  *  Eat  such  things  as  are  set  before 
you,'  eo-fliere  TO,  Trapart^e/xeva  vjuv.  If  the  coincidence  is  more 
than  accidental,  I  should  ascribe  it  to  the  adoption  as  his 
own,  by  St.  Paul,  of  well-known  words  of  our  Lord.  But  the 
question  whether  Luke  might  have  seen  one  or  two  Epistles 
of  St.  Paul  is  one  which  I  have  no  interest  in  contesting. 
However  that  be  decided,  two  facts  remain.  First,  the  Acts 
say  nothing  as  to  Paul's  having  written  letters.  Now,  if  the 
Acts  had  been  compiled  after  these  letters  had  obtained 
general  circulation,  the  compiler  would  at  least  have  men 
tioned,  as  every  modern  biographer  of  Paul  does,  the  fact  of 
their  composition,  even  if  he  had  nothing  to  tell  about  the 
circumstances  which  drew  them  forth.  When  speaking,  for 
example,  of  Paul's  residence  in  Corinth,  he  would  have  noted 
that  thence  Paul  wrote  his  Epistle  to  the  Church  of  Rome. 
Biographers  of  St.  John,  of  whom  I  shall  speak  in  the  next 
lecture,  do  not  fail  to  tell  the  circumstances  under  which  he 
wrote  his  Gospel.  But  to  the  author  of  the  Acts  St.  Paul  is 


XVIII.]    EXTERNAL  CONFIRMATION  OF  LUKE'S  ACCURACY.     347 

known,  not  as  a  writer,  but  as  a  man  of  action.  We  conclude, 
then,  that  this  book  must  have  been  written  before  the  period 
when  Paul's  letters  had  passed  from  being  the  special  property 
of  the  several  Churches  to  which  they  were  addressed,  and  had 
become  the  general  property  of  Christians.  Secondly,  the 
Acts  not  only  do  not  mention  Paul's  epistles,  but  show  very 
scanty  signs  of  acquaintance  with  them.  It  follows,  then, 
that  the  familiarity  with  Paul's  diction  which  the  writer  con 
fessedly  exhibits,  if  not  obtained  from  a  study  of  his  letters, 
must  have  been  derived  from  close  personal  intercourse. 

The  language  of  Peter's  speeches  in  the  Acts  has  also  been 
compared  with  that  of  Peter's  First  Epistle,  the  result  being 
to  elicit  several  coincidences.  Thus  the  idea  that  Jesus  was 
delivered  by  the  determinate  counsel  of  God  occurs  three 
times  in  Peter's  speeches  (ii.  23,  iv.  28,  x.  42),  and  is  found 
in  the  Epistle  (i.  2,  20 ;  ii.  4,  6).  The  prophecy  (Ps.  cxviii. 
22)  of  our  Lord,  as  the  stone  set  at  nought  by  the  builders,  is 
quoted  (Acts  iv.  ii,  i  Pet.  ii.  6).  And  generally  the  Petrine 
speeches  in  the  Acts  agree  with  the  Epistle  in  their  thorough 
harmony  with  Paul's  doctrine.  But  whether  that  is  a  reason 
for  doubting  their  authenticity  had  better  be  postponed  until 
I  come  to  discuss  the  Epistle. 

I  have  thought  that  the  most  important  point  on  which  to 
dwell  in  the  limited  time  at  my  disposal  is  the  proof  that  the 
compiler  of  the  Acts  was  a  companion  of  St.  Paul.  If  this 
were  not  established  it  would  be  useless  to  give  proofs  of 
Luke's  accuracy  in  particulars,  and  of  his  exact  knowledge 
of  localities.  It  would  simply  be  said  that  the  compiler  had 
access  to  some  very  good  sources  of  information.  I  may, 
however,  give  you  a  few  specimens  of  the  argument  into  the 
details  of  which  I  am  not  able  to  enter.  On  one  point,  for 
instance,  on  which  Luke's  accuracy  had  been  questioned, 
further  investigation  has  confirmed  it.  Sergius  Paulus  is 
described  (xiii.  7)  as  proconsul  (avOvTraros)  at  Cyprus.  Now, 
we  learn  from  Strabo  (xiv.  xvii.  25)  that  there  were  two 
classes  of  provinces  in  the  Roman  empire,  as  arranged  by 
Augustus  :  one,  the  ruler  of  which  was  appointed  by  the 
Senate ;  the  other,  where  military  operations  were  likely 
to  be  necessary,  the  ruler  of  which  was  appointed  by  the 


348  THE   ACTS    OF   THE   APOSTLES.  [XVIII. 

emperor.  The  ruler  of  a  senatorial  province  bore  the  title  of 
Proconsul  ;  that  of  an  imperial  province  was  called  Proprae 
tor  (avTioT/ocmyyos).  Strabo  further  informs  us  that  Cyprus 
was  governed  by  o-rpar^yot.  Hence  it  was  inferred  that  these 
were  styled  propraetors,  and  that  Cyprus  therefore  was  one  of 
the  provinces  which  Augustus  had  reserved  for  himself;  so  it 
had  been  set  down  as  a  mistake  of  Luke's  that  he  called  the 
governor  proconsul.  But  Strabo  expressly  places  Cyprus  on 
the  list  of  senatorial  provinces;  and  it  is  certain  that  the 
crrpar^yoi,  by  whom  he  tells  us  Cyprus  was  governed,  bore 
the  title  of  Proconsul,  and  were  praetors  only  as  regards  their 
previous  rank.  This  is  clearly  stated  by  Dion  Cassius,  who 
further  informs  us  (liii.  12,  liv.  4)  that  though  Cyprus  had 
been  at  first  on  Augustus's  list,  a  rectification  was  subse 
quently  made  by  him,  the  disturbed  province  of  Dalmatia, 
which  had  been  assigned  to  the  Senate,  having  been  ex 
changed  for  quiet  provinces  in  the  emperor's  portion  ;  and 
that  at  that  time  Cyprus  reverted  to  the  Senate.  This  is 
confirmed  by  coins  and  other  remains,*  showing  that  down 
to  and  after  the  time  of  Paul's  visit  the  governor  of  Cyprus 
bore  the  title  of  Proconsul.  It  may  be  mentioned  that  Pliny, 
in  his  Natural  History,  for  two  books,  n.  and  xvui.,  quotes 
the  authority  of  a  Sergius  Paulus.  The  name  is  not  so  un 
common  as  to  make  an  identification  certain  ;  yet,  since  in 
each  of  the  two  books  for  which  he  cites  the  name  Pliny  tells 
something  about  the  natural  history  of  Cyprus,  it  is  likely 
enough  that  the  same  person  is  meant.  At  several  of  the 
other  places  which  Paul  visited  we  have  equal  accuracy  in 
the  description  of  the  magistrates.  At  Corinth,  Gallio  is 
described  as  avOvTraros  (Acts  xviii.  12).  This  was  in  the  reign 
of  Claudius.  Under  Tiberius,  Achaia  was  imperial  ;  under 
Nero  it  was  independent  ;  under  Claudius  it  was  senatorial, 
as  represented  by  St.  Luke  (see  Tacit.  Ann.  i.  76;  Sueton., 
Claudius,  25).  In  Ephesus  the  mention  of  avOvTraroi  (xix.  38) 


*  In  Cesnola's  Cyprus  an  inscription  is  given  (p.  425)  in  which  the  words 
EFII  riATAOY  [AN0]TIIATpr  occur.  This  may  have  been  the  Sergius 
Paulus  of  St.  Luke.  I  derive  this  reference,  as  well  as  other  of  the  points 
noted  above,  from  an  article  by  Bp.  Lightfoot,  Contemporary  Review,  May, 
1878. 


XVIII.]     EXTERNAL  CONFIRMATION  OF  LUKE'S  ACCURACY.    349 

is  equally  correct.  At  Thessalonica,  again,  the  magistrates 
are  called  politarchs  (Acts  xvii.  6).  Now  this  name  is  found 
in  connexion  with  Thessalonica  in  no  ancient  author ;  but 
an  arch  which  to  this  day  spans  the  main  street  of  the  city 
bears  the  inscription  that  it  had  been  raised  by  the  seven 
politarchs.*  It  is  a  curious  coincidence,  but  one  on  which 
nothing  can  be  built,  that  among  their  names  we  find  Gaius, 
Secundus,  and  Sosipater — all  three  names  occurring  in  Acts 
xx.  4,  and  that  of  Secundus  in  connexion  with  Thessalonica. 
St.  Luke  mentions  also  the  Demos  of  Thessalonica,  an  ap 
propriate  word  in  speaking  of  a  free  city.  Srpa-nyyoi',  praetors, 
seems  a  very  grand  title  for  the  two  magistrates  of  the  little 
provincial  city  of  Philippi  (Acts  xvi.  20) ;  but  Cicero,  in  one 
of  his  orations  f  a  hundred  years  earlier,  laughs  at  the  magis 
trates  of  an  Italian  provincial  town  who  had  the  impudence 
to  call  themselves  praetors ;  and  no  doubt  what  happened 
then  was  very  likely  to  happen  again.  That  Philippi  was  a 
Colonia  (Acts  xvi.  12)  is  confirmed  by  Dion  Cassius  (li.  4). 
The  governor  of  Melita  is  neither  Proconsul  nor  Propraetor, 
but  head-man,  TT/DWTOS,  a  title  the  accuracy  of  which  is  at 
tested  by  inscriptions  (Boeckh,  No.  5754).  Luke's  mention  of 
Iconium  is  noteworthy  (Acts  xiii.  51).  Just  before  (xiii.  13), 
he  has  described  Perga  as  *  of  Pamphylia,'  Antioch  as  '  of 
Pisidia:'  just  after  (xiv.  6),  Lystra  and  Derbe  as  '  the  cities  of 
Lycaonia.'  Iconium  alone  is  named  without  geographical 
designation.  Now  it  seems  likely  that  Iconium  was  at  the 
time  extra- provincial;  for  Paul's  contemporary  Pliny  (Nat. 
Hist.  v.  25)  distinguishes  it  from  Lycaonia  proper  as  the 
chief  of  fourteen  cities  which  formed  an  independent 
tetrarchy.j 

Before  leaving  the  subject  of  the  Acts,  I  may  mention  one 


*  Boeckh,  Inscr.  Gr.  No.  1967 ;  Leake's  Northern  Greece,  in.  236. 

t  De  Leg.  Agrar.  contra  Rullum,  §  xxxiv.     See  also  Hor.  Sat.  i.  v.  34. 

J  I  owe  this  remark  to  Dr.  Gwynn,  who  has  also  observed  with  regard 
to  the  titles  of  provincial  magistrates,  that  the  Acts  of  Paul  and  Thecla 
(see  next  lecture),  show  how  easy  it  was  for  a  later  writer  to  go  wrong 
in  this  matter.  The  'proconsul'  at  Antioch  in  these  Acts  (§  32)  is 
clearly  a  mistake  ;  for  the  Syrian  Antioch  is  meant,  and  Syria  was  not  a 
Senatorial  Province.  The  case  of  the  '  proconsul'  at  Iconium  (§§  16-20) 
is  less  clear.  Iconium  apparently  had  its  own  tetrarch  (see  above)  ; 


350  THE  ACTS  OF   THE   APOSTLES.  [XVIII. 

of  the  newest  attacks  on  it — so  new,  indeed,  that  the  author 
of  Supernatural  Religion  had  not  discovered  it  when  he  pub 
lished  his  volume  on  the  Acts  in  1877;  but  shortly  after, 
having  met  an  article  by  Holtzmann  in  Hilgenfeld's  Zeitschrift 
for  1873,  he  communicated  an  abstract  of  it  to  the  Fortnightly 
Review,  Oct.,  1877.  St.  Luke  had  been  accused  of  certain 
historical  blunders,  the  evidence  being  that  he  is  on  certain 
points  at  variance  with  Josephus  ;  for,  of  course,  it  is  assumed 
that,  if  there  be  a  difference,  Josephus  is  right  and  Luke 
wrong.  But  Holtzmann  imagined  himself  to  have  discovered 
that  Luke  made  use  of  the  work  of  Josephus,  and  con 
sequently  wrote  later ;  and  therefore  not  till  after  the  close  of 
the  first  century.  It  is  amusing  to  find  that  the  main  part  of 
the  proof  is,  that  the  names  of  different  public  characters 
mentioned  by  St.  Luke  are  also  mentioned  by  Josephus ; 
for  example,  Annas  and  Caiaphas,  Gamaliel,  Herod,  Felix, 
Festus,  &c.  In  the  same  way  we  can  prove  that  the  political 
tracts  ascribed  to  Dean  Swift  were  in  reality  written  in  the 
reign  of  George  III. ;  for  they  mention  Queen  Anne,  the 
Duke  of  Marlborough,  Harley,  and  St.  John,  showing  clearly 
that  the  author  must  have  read  Smollett's  History  of  England. 
The  author  of  Supernatural  Religion  strengthens  the  proof  by 
finding  spread  over  eleven  or  more  sections  of  Josephus  some 
of  the  words  which  occur  in  three  verses  of  St.  Luke's  pre 
face.  But  in  truth  a  man  unacquainted  with  the  literature  of 
the  period  is  as  incompetent  to  say  whether  the  occurrence 
of  the  same  words  in  different  authors  is  a  proof  of  literary 
obligation,  as  a  negro  who  had  never  seen  more  than  two 
white  men  in  his  life  would  be  to  say  whether  their  likeness 
to  each  other  was  a  proof  of  close  relationship.  Thus  Luke 
could  have  found  in  the  Septuagint  the  greater  part  of  the 
words  he  is  accused  of  borrowing  from  Josephus.  Others 

possibly  its  Duumviri,  as  a  Colonia  (Boeckh,  3991,  3993  ;  Eckhel,  Doctr. 
Numm.  Vet.  III.  32;  Marquardt,  Romische  Staatsverw.,  Band  I.,  Zweiter 
Abschnitt  B.,  xxx.),  or  if  counted  as  of  Lycaonia,  it  would  belong,  at  dif 
ferent  times,  to  Galatia  (Strabo,  xn.  v.  I  ;  vi.  i),  to  Cappadocia  (Ptolemy, 
v.  6),  to  Asia  (Pliny,  ut  supr.  [?],  Boeckh,  3188).  Of  these,  Asia  alone 
was  a  Senatorial  Province.  If,  however,  the  proconsul  of  Asia  were 
intended,  this  great  official  would  not  be  found  within  call  of  a  plaintiff  in 
a  third-rate  and  outlying  city  of  his  province. 


XVIII.]  HAD  THE  WRITER  READ  JOSEPHUS  ?  351 


again  (avroTrr^s  for  example),  as  Dr.  Hobart  has  shown 
{Medical  Language  of  St.  Luke,  pp.  87-90),  belong  to  the 
vocabulary  of  Greek  medical  writers.  Galen's  prefaces  have 
closer  affinities  with  St.  Luke's  than  have  those  of  Josephus.* 
Thus  we  find  in  Galen's  prefaces  the  complimentary  epi 
thet  /cparto-re,  the  commencement  by  eTreiS?}  with  So/cei  for 
apodosis,  the  phrases  d/cpi/3cos  TrapaKoXovOfja-at,  and  eTTt^etpetv. 
Several  of  the  words  on  which  an  argument  has  been  built 
are  the  common  property  of  all  who  use  the  Greek  language. 
One  of  the  words  which  it  is  assumed  Luke  could  not  have 
known  unless  he  had  learned  it  from  Josephus  is  actually 
TV'TTTO)  ;  which  would  raise  the  question,  if  the  doubt  had  not 
occurred  to  one  before,  whether  the  objector  had  ever  seen  a 
Greek  grammar.  Perhaps  the  highest  point  of  laughable 
absurdity  is  reached  by  Krenkel  (Hilgenfeld's  Zeitschrift, 
1873,  p.  441),  who  thinks  that  Luke  would  not  have  known 
how  to  describe  our  Lord  as  a  TTOL<S  erwv  SwSe/ca  if  Josephus 
had  not  spoken  of  his  own  proficiency  when  he  was  Trats  7re/o! 
Teo-o-apeo-KaiSe'/caroi/  eros.  Krenkel  suggests  that  Luke  altered 
the  14  of  Josephus  into  12,  because  the  latter  was  a  sacred 
number.  No  doubt,  if  the  difference  had  been  the  other  way, 
it  would  have  been  found  that  twice  seven  was  the  sacred 
number. 

Though  Luke  and  Josephus  frequently  mention  the  same 
people,  the  discrepancies  between  them  are  as  remarkable  as 
the  coincidences.  For  instance,  the  '  Egyptian  '  who  in  Acts 
xxi.  38  leads  out  4000  Sicarii  is  in  Bell.  Jud.  n.  xiii.  5  at  the 
head  of  30,000  ;  and  so  on.  Anyone,  therefore,  who  says  that 
Luke  read  Josephus  is  bound  to  say  also  that  Luke  was  a  very 
careless  person  who  remembered  very  little  of  what  he  read. 
And  the  best  critics  of  the  sceptical  school  have  found  them 
selves  unable  to  execute  the  change  of  front  from  accusing 
Luke  of  contradicting  Josephus  to  accusing  him  of  having 
copied  him. 

*  Galen  wrote  in  the  latter  half  of  the  second  century,  but  his  writings 
may  be  taken  as  probable  evidence  of  the  usage  of  previous  medical  writers. 
The  use  of  ^TrixeipeiV,  as  above,  is  found  in  Hippocrates  some  centuries 
earlier,  as  Dr.  Hobart  has  pointed  out. 


(  35*  ) 


XIX. 


APOCRYPHAL  ACTS  OF  THE  APOSTLES. 


IN  discussing  the  relation  between  St.  Matthew's  Gospel 
and  the  so-called  Gospel  of  the  Hebrews,  I  was  led,  in  a 
former  lecture,  to  speak  of  other  non-canonical  gospels ;  and 
thus  I  have  come  to  include  in  the  plan  of  these  lectures  an 
account  not  only  of  the  writings  which  have  obtained  admis 
sion  into  the  New  Testament  Canon,  but  also  of  those  which 
at  any  time  seemed  to  have  pretensions  to  find  their  way 
into  it.* 

This,  then,  would  seem  to  be  the  place  to  treat  of  Apocry 
phal  Acts  of  the  Apostles  ;  but  though  there  is  great  abun 
dance  of  legendary  tales  of  Apostolic  labours  and  miracles, 
there  is  scarcely  any  extant  document,  which  either  on  the 
ground  of  antiquity  or  of  extent  of  acceptance,  can  make 
remote  pretensions  to  canonical  authority.  If  we  were  to 

*  Until  comparatively  lately  the  most  important  collection  of  such 
writings  was  that  by  Fabricius  (Codex  Apocryph  us,  N.T.,  Hamburg,  1719). 
In  1832  a  new  Codex  Apocryphus  was  commenced  by  Thilo,  but  he  did 
not  publish  more  than  the  first  volume  containing  Apocryphal  Gospels. 
A  collection  of  Apocryphal  Acts  was  published  by  Tischendorf  in  1851, 
followed  by  Apocryphal  Gospels  in  1853,  2nd  edit.  1876,  and  by  a  volume 
containing  Apocryphal  Revelations  and  some  supplements  to  his  volume 
of  Acts  in  1866.  Syriac  Apocryphal  Acts  of  the  Apostles  have  been  made 
accessible  by  Professor  Wm.  Wright  (London,  1871).  A  very  important 
addition  to  our  sources  of  information  will  be  made  in  Max  Bonnett's  Sup- 
plementum  Codicis  Apocryphi,  of  which  the  first  part  containing  the  Acts 
of  St.  Thomas  appeared  in  1883.  A  complete  account  of  all  that  is  known 
on  the  subject  will  be  found  in  Lipsius's  Die  apokryphen  Apostelgeschichten 
und  Apostellegenden,  1883,  a  work  in  two  large  volumes. 

Lipsius,  Rd.  A.,  born  1830,  Professor  of  Theology  at  Jena.  Though 
differing  in  opinion  from  him  on  many  important  points,  I  cannot  forbear  to 
acknowledge  the  obligations  students  owe  to  his  ability,  learning,  and  in 
dustry. 


XIX.]  GNOSTIC   ACTS.  353 

judge  by  the  number  of  New  Testament  books  which  modern 
critics  have  rejected  as  spurious,  we  should  be  led  to  think 
that  the  early  Church  was  extremely  easy  in  admitting  the 
claims  of  any  document  which  aspired  to  a  place  in  the 
Canon.  But  actually  we  find  cause  to  admire  the  extreme 
rigour  of  the  scrutiny  to  which  any  such  claim  was  sub 
jected. 

We  have  already  seen  that  the  two  minor  Epistles  of  St. 
John  (whose  common  authorship  with  the  First  Epistle  there 
is  no  good  reason  to  doubt)  did  not  find  acceptance  at  once, 
or  without  controversy.  Like  hesitation  was  shown  (and  as 
I  believe  without  any  just  cause)  in  the  case  of  St.  James's 
Epistle,  of  which  I  have  still  to  speak.  And  though  the  story 
of  the  labours  and  sufferings  of  the  first  preachers  of  the 
Gospel  constituted  the  reading  which  Christians  found  at 
once  most  interesting  and  most  edifying,  it  does  not  appear 
that  anyone  dreamed  of  setting  any  record  of  Apostolic 
labours  on  a  level  with  that  made  by  St.  Luke.  The  conse 
quence  was,  that  this  branch  of  Christian  literature,  being 
not  interfered  with  or  controlled  by  ecclesiastical  authority, 
became  liable  to  great  variations  of  form.  Successive  re- 
lators  of  these  stories  modified  them  to  suit  their  respective 
tastes  or  to  express  their  doctrinal  views  ;  so  that  now  it  is 
often  a  difficult  and  uncertain  task  for  critical  sagacity  to 
recover  the  original  form  of  the  legends.  The  difficulty  is 
increased  by  the  number  of  the  documents  that  demand  in 
vestigation,  much  still  remaining  to  be  done  for  a  complete 
examination  of  the  Greek  and  Latin  lives  to  be  found  in 
Western  libraries,  while  considerable  addition  to  the  stock  of 
materials  may  be  expected  from  Oriental  sources. 

That  the  Apocryphal  Acts  of  the  Apostles  should  be  sub 
jected  to  some  alterations  and  recastings  was  indeed  a  neces 
sity  resulting  from  the  fact  that  it  was  in  heretical  circles  that 
the  majority  took  their  origin.  I  have  already  (Lect.  n.) 
spoken  of  the  Clementines,  which  were  in  fact  Ebionite  Acts 
of  Peter.  There  was  still  more  active  manufacture  of  apocry 
phal  literature  among  the  Gnostics,  some  of  whom  displayed 
great  fertility  of  invention,  and  had  tales  to  tell  of  wonders 
wrought  by  the  Apostles  which  had  as  lively  interest  for  the 

2  A 


354  APOCRYPHAL   ACTS    OF   THE  APOSTLES.  [XIX. 

orthodox  as  for  the  heretics.  So  members  of  the  Catholic 
Church  who  met  with  these  Gnostic  Acts  found  it  easy  to 
believe  that  the  facts  related  in  them  were  in  the  main  true, 
however  much  they  might  have  been  disfigured  by  heretical 
additions.*  And  then  it  was  a  natural  step  to  expurgate  these 
Acts,  cancelling  as  spurious  what  was  found  distasteful  to 
orthodox  feelings,  or  giving  the  story  some  modification 
which  would  remove  the  offence.  For  instance,  Encratism 
is  a  prominent  feature  of  the  Gnostic  Acts.  The  married  life 
is  treated  as  absolutely  unlawful.  The  Apostolic  preachers  are 
represented  as  having  done  a  good  work,  when  a  couple 
about  to  unite  in  wedlock  have  been  prevailed  on  to  abandon 
the  design,  or  when  a  wife  has  been  persuaded  to  refuse  fur 
ther  intercourse  with  her  husband.  The  persecution  which 
the  Christian  preachers  meet  with  is  frequently  represented  as 
arising  from  the  natural  resentment  of  husbands  at  such 
teaching.  When  these  stories  are  repeated  by  an  orthodox 
narrator,  the  heretical  character  of  the  Encratism  is  removed. 
The  woman  who  separates  herself  is  not  a  wife  but  a  concu 
bine  ;  or  there  is  some  impediment  of  close  kindred ;  or  the 
separation  is  not  intended  to  be  permanent,  but  is  only  a 
temporary  withdrawal  for  purposes  of  devotion,  or  in  order 
more  closely  to  attend  to  the  Apostolic  preaching. 

I.  There  is  no  heretical  taint  in  the  work  which  I  take  first 
to  describe,  and  which  related  the  preaching  of  Addai  or 
Thaddaeus,  to  Abgarus,  king  of  Edessa.  I  place  it  first  be 
cause  we  have  an  assurance  of  the  antiquity  of  the  story  in 
the  fact  that  Eusebius  accepted  it  as  authentic,  and  gave  an 
abstract  of  it,  at  the  end  of  the  first  book  of  his  Ecclesiastical 
History.  He  states  that  he  derived  his  account  from  records 
written  in  Syriac,  preserved  in  the  archives  of  the  city  of  Edessa. 
This  city,  the  capital  of  Osrhoene,  the  northern  province  of 
Mesopotamia,  was  for  a  long  period  a  centre  of  theological 

*  The  preface  of  the  pseudo-Melito  to  his  'Passion  of  St.  John,'  in 
words  reproduced  in  a  forged  letter  of  Jerome  to  Chromatius  and  Helio- 
dorus,  exemplifies  the  opinion  of  an  orthodox  reviser  concerning  the  work 
of  his  heretical  predecessor  :  '  Quaedam  de  virtutibus  quidem  [et  miraculis], 
quse  per  eos  Dominus  fecit,  vera  dixit ;  de  doctrina  vero  multa  mentitus 
est.'  Thus,  by  a  curious  reversal  of  modern  canons  of  belief,  the  rule  is, 
Believe  all  the  miraculous  part  of  the  story,  and  disbelieve  the  rest. 


XIX.]  THE   ABGAR   LEGEND   OF   EDESSA.  355 

culture  for  Syriac-speaking  Christians.  It  boasted  with  pride 
of  the  early  date  at  which  it  had  received  the  Gospel ;  and  in 
time  it  was  believed  to  have  derived  special  privileges  from  the 
reception  by  its  king  of  a  letter  from  our  Saviour's  own  hand. 
The  barbarians  should  never  be  able  to  take  the  city.  No 
idolater,  no  Jew,  no  heretic  could  live  in  it.  With  these  privi 
leges,  however,  we  are  not  immediately  concerned,  since  the 
belief  in  them  is  of  later  origin  than  the  story  with  which  I 
have  to  do.  This  is  that  Abgar,  one  of  several  successive 
rulers  of  Edessa  who  bore  this  name,  being  afflicted  with  a 
sore  disease,  and  having  heard  of  the  mighty  deeds  of  Jesus, 
who  cured  sicknesses  by  the  power  of  his  word  alone,  and  who 
even  raised  the  dead,  sent  ambassadors  to  Him  with  a  letter, 
of  which  Eusebius  gives  a  translation.  In  this  he  expresses 
his  belief  that  Jesus  must  be  either  God  or  the  Son  of  God ; 
and  he  begs  Him  to  have  pity  on  him  and  heal  his  disease. 
He  has  heard  of  the  plots  which  the  Jews  are  contriving 
against  Jesus,  and  offers  Him  refuge  in  his  city,  which  though 
small  is  of  good  consideration  and  well  sufficient  for  them  both. 
Eusebius  gives  also  a  translation  of  what  purports  to  be  a 
letter  from  our  Lord  in  answer.  In  some  versions  of  the 
story  our  Lord's  answer  is  verbal:  in  others  the  verbal  answer 
is  turned  into  a  letter  by  the  Apostle  Thomas.  It  begins, 
'Blessed  art  thou  who  hast  believed  in  me  without  having 
seen  me ;  for  it  is  written  of  me  that  they  who  have  seen  me 
shall  not  believe  me,  and  that  they  who  have  not  seen  me 
shall  believe  and  live.'  There  seems  to  be  here  a  clear  use  of 
John  xx.  29.  The  nearest  Old  Testament  passage  is  Is.  Hi.  15, 
and  the  resemblance  to  that  is  not  very  close.  The  letter  goes 
on  to  say  that  our  Lord  must  finish  all  the  things  for  which 
He  had  been  sent,  and  afterwards  be  taken  up  to  Him  that 
had  sent  Him;  but  that,  after  He  had  been  taken  up,  He 
would  send  one  of  His  disciples,  who  should  heal  his  disease 
and  give  life  to  him  and  his  people.  Then  the  story  relates 
that  after  our  Lord's  Ascension,  the  Apostle  Judas,  also  called 
Thomas,  sent  Thaddseus,  one  of  the  Seventy,  who  preached  to 
Abgar  and  healed  him  of  his  disease,  the  king  declaring  that 
he  had  already  so  believed  in  Jesus  that  if  it  had  not  been  for 
the  power  of  the  Romans,  he  would  have  gone  with  an  army 

2  A  2 


356  APOCRYPHAL   ACTS    OF   THE   APOSTLES.  [XIX. 

to  destroy  the  Jews  who  had  crucified  Jesus.  Thaddaeus 
teaches  him  the  cause  why  our  Lord  had  been  sent  into 
the  world,  and  tells  him  of  our  Lord's  mighty  work,  and  of 
the  mysteries  which  He  spoke  to  the  world  ;  how  He  abased 
Himself  and  humbled  His  Divinity,  and  was  crucified,  and 
descended  into  Hades,  and  clove  the  wall  of  partition  which 
from  eternity  had  never  been  cleft,  and  brought  up  the  dead. 
For  He  descended  alone,  but  ascended  with  many  to  His 
Father.*  Eusebius  concludes  his  abstract  by  telling  that 
Abgar  offered  Thaddaeus  silver  and  gold  ;  but  he  refused, 
saying,  How  shall  we  who  have  abandoned  our  own  property 
take  that  which  belongs  to  others  ?  He  gives  the  date,  the 
year  340 — that  is  of  the  Seleucian  era,  corresponding  to 
the  year  28  or  29  of  ours. 

Either  the  book  from  which  Eusebius  made  his  extracts,  or 
an  amplification  of  it,  is  still  extant  in  Syriac.  It  is  called 
The  Teaching  of  Addai,  and  was  edited,  with  an  English  trans 
lation,  by  Dr.  Phillips,  in  1876.  It  contains,  with  only  trifling 
variations,  all  that  is  cited  by  Eusebius;  but  it  contains  a 
good  deal  more.  For  example,  the  letter  of  our  Lord  concludes 
with  a  promise  of  inviolability  to  the  city  of  Edessa.  There  is 
a  story  of  which  you  must  have  heard,  but  about  which  Euse 
bius  is  silent,  that  one  of  Abgar's  ambassadors,  being  the 
royal  painter,  took  a  picture  of  our  Lord  and  brought  it  back 
with  him  to  Edessa.  There  is  a  correspondence  between 
Abgar  and  the  Emperor  Tiberius,  in  which  Abgar  urges  the 
Roman  emperor  to  punish  the  Jews  for  the  murder  of  our 
Lord ;  and  Tiberius  answers  that  he  had  disgraced  Pilate  for 
his  share  in  the  crime,  but  that  he  was  prevented  by  troubles 
in  Spain  from  taking  immediate  steps  against  the  Jews.  And 
there  is  a  story  about  Protonice,  the  wife  of  the  Emperor 
Claudius,  almost  identical  with  that  told  of  Constantine's 
mother  Helena,  namely,  that  she  sought  for  our  Lord's  cross, 
and,  finding  three,  was  enabled  to  distinguish  the  right  one 
by  applying  them  successively  to  a  dead  body,  which  was 
unaffected  by  the  touch  of  the  crosses  of  the  two  thieves, 

*  This  recognizes  the  story  of  the  '  harrowing  of  hell,'  told  in  the  Gospel 
of  Nicodemus  (see  p.  201). 


XIX.]  THE   ACTS    OF    PAUL  AND   THECLA.  357 

but  was  restored  to  life  when  touched  by  that  of  our  Lord. 
It  is  a  question  whether  Eusebius  designedly  omitted  all  this 
matter,  or  whether  it  was  added  since  his  time.  Lipsius,  who 
has  made  a  special  study  of  this  story,*  decides  in  favour  of 
the  latter  supposition,  a  conclusion  which  I  have  no  inclina 
tion  to  dispute.  He  dates  the  original  document  used  by 
Eusebius  A.  D.  250,  and  the  enlargement  about  360.  I  have 
already  (see  p.  83)  had  occasion  to  refer  to  one  of  the  proofs 
that  the  document  is  not  earlier  than  the  third  century,  viz. 
that  it  represents  Addai  as  using  the  Diatessaron  in  the  public 
service.  The  reading  of  Paul's  Epistles  and  of  the  Acts  of 
the  Apostles  is  also  especially  mentioned  (p.  44)4 

II.  The  work  which  I  next  consider  might,  on  chrono 
logical  grounds,  have  been  placed  first,  for  it  has  earlier 
attestation  and  was  earlier  written :  the  Acts  of  Paul  and 
Thecla.  In  this  story,  as  I  shall  presently  tell,  Thecla  is 
related  to  have  baptized  herself,  and  consequently  her  case 
was  cited  against  Tertullian  in  the  controversy  whether  or 
not  it  was  permissible  for  females  to  baptize.  He  disposes 
of  the  citation  (De  Baptismo,  17)  by  denying  the  authenticity 
of  the  book;  and  makes  the  interesting  statement  that  a 
presbyter  in  Asia  had  confessed  his  authorship  of  the  work, 
pleading  that  he  had  made  it  through  love  of  Paul,  whereupon 
he  was  deposed  from  his  office.  Thus  we  learn  that  the  story 
of  Thecla  was  current  in  the  second  century  ;  and  I  know  no 
good  reason  for  doubting  that  it  was,  in  its  main  substance, 
the  same  as  that  contained  in  the  Acts  now  extant.  Not 
withstanding  Tertullian's  rejection,  the  story  of  Thecla  is 
used  as  genuine  by  a  whole  host  of  fathers:  Ambrose, 
Augustine,  Gregory  Nyssen,  Gregory  Nazianzen,  Epiphanius, 
Chrysostom,  and  others. J  Though  Eusebius  does  not  directly 

*  Die  edessenische  Abgarsage,  1880. 

t  Bishop  Reeves  tells  me  that  no  inference,  as  to  the  currency  of  the 
Thaddseus  legend  in  Ireland,  can  be  drawn  from  the  common  use  of  the 
name  Thady  :  this  being  but  the  representative  of  a  Celtic  name,  signifying 
'  poet,'  and  also  known  in  the  form  Teigue. 

J  Ambrose  de  Virginibus  II.  ;  August.  Contra  Faust,  xxx.  4 ;  Greg. 
Nyss.  Horn.  14  in  Cantic.  Canticor.;  Greg.  Naz.  Orat.  xxiv.  in  Laud.  S. 
Cypr.  10,  Prcecept.  ad  Virgg.  v.  190;  Epiphan.  H&r.  Ixxviii.  1 6 ;  Chrys. 
in  Act.,  Horn.  25. 


358  APOCRYPHAL   ACTS    OF   THE   APOSTLES.  [XIX. 

mention  Thecla,  he  shows  his  knowledge  of  her  story  by 
calling  another  Thecla  -YJ  Ka.0*  fjpas  ©e'xAa  (Mart.  Pal.  3).  His 
contemporary  Methodius,  in  his  Symposium,  makes  Thecla 
the  victor  in  the  contest  of  virgins.  The  Acts  were  translated 
into  Latin,  Syriac,  and  Arabic. 

These  Acts  of  Paul  and  Thecla  are  deeply  tinged  with 
Encratism.  This  sufficiently  appears  from  the  following 
specimen  of  Paul's  preaching :  '  Blessed  are  the  pure  in 
heart,  for  they  shall  see  God.  Blessed  are  they  who  keep 
the  flesh  undefiled,  for  they  shall  become  the  temple  of  God. 
Blessed  are  the  continent  (ot  eyKpareis),  for  God  shall  speak 
unto  them.  Blessed  are  they  who  renounce  this  world,  for 
they  shall  be  called  upright.  Blessed  are  they  who  have 
wives  as  though  they  had  them  not,  for  they  shall  inherit 
God.  .  .  .  Blessed  are  the  bodies  of  the  virgins,  for  they 
shall  be  well  pleasing  to  God,  and  shall  not  lose  the  reward 
of  their  chastity/  This  sermon  is  delivered  by  Paul  in  the 
house  of  his  host  Onesiphorus  at  Iconium,  where  the  story 
opens.  The  virgin  Thecla  overhears  it  from  the  window  of 
her  neighbouring  house,  and  is  delighted  with  the  Apostle's 
praises  of  virginity.  She  hangs  '  like  a  spider'  at  the  window 
for  three  days  and  nights  together,  not  leaving  it  either  to 
eat  or  to  drink,  until  her  mother  in  despair  sends  for  Thecla's 
affianced  husband  Thamyris,  the  chief  man  of  the  city.  But 
his  interference  is  in  vain  ;  Thecla  has  no  ears  for  anyone 
but  Paul. 

Thamyris,  going  out,  meets  two  of  Paul's  companions, 
Demas  and  Hermogenes,  men  full  of  hypocrisy,  and  asks 
them  who  this  deceiver  was  who  forbade  marriages  to  take 
place.  They  tell  him  that  Paul  robbed  young  men  of  their 
wives,  and  maidens  of  their  husbands,  teaching  them,  '  Ye 
have  no  part  in  the  Resurrection  unless  ye  remain  chaste 
and  do  not  defile  your  flesh  ;'  but  they  teach  him  that  the 
Resurrection  has  already  taken  place,  consisting  in  the 
generation  of  children,  and  in  the  obtaining  the  knowledge 
of  the  true  God. 

I  may  remark  in  passing  that  the  use  of  the  names 
Onesiphorus,  Demas,  and  Hermogenes,  the  parts  ascribed 
to  these  characters,  and  the  doctrine  about  the  Resurrection 


XIX.]  THE    ACTS   OF   PAUL  AND   THECLA.  359 

being  past  already,  show  clearly  that  the  writer  of  these  Acts 
had  read  the  Second  Epistle  to  Timothy  with  which  his 
work  has  other  verbal  coincidences.  These  last  coincidences 
might,  perhaps,  be  explained  away  as  arising  from  additions 
made  by  an  orthodox  reviser ;  but  a  reviser  would  not  be 
likely  to  alter  the  names  of  the  characters.  Onesiphorus  is 
described  as  seeking  for  Paul  (2  Tim.  i.  17),  and  you  may 
care  to  hear  the  description  by  which  he  had  been  taught  to 
recognize  the  Apostle.  He  was  a  man  of  small  stature,  with 
bald  head,  bow-legged,  of  a  healthy  complexion  (eueKTiKos), 
with  eyebrows  joined  together,  and  a  somewhat  aquiline  nose 
(/u/cpws  cTTtptvos).*  I  have  only  mentioned  the  coincidences 
with  2  Timothy  because  this  is  a  disputed  book.  These  Acts 
are  full  of  coincidences  with  the  New  Testament.  You  may 
have  noticed  two  in  the  fragment  of  Paul's  sermon  which  I 
quoted,  '  Blessed  are  the  pure  in  heart,  for  they  shall  see 
God/  and  '  they  that  have  wives,  as  though  they  had  none.' 

At  the  instigation  of  the  false  disciples,  Paul  is  arraigned 
before  the  proconsul ;  but  the  first  night  of  his  imprisonment 
Thecla,  by  gifts  of  her  personal  ornaments,  bribes  the  porter 
of  her  own  house  to  let  her  out,  and  the  jailer  to  let  her  in, 
and  sits  at  Paul's  feet  and  receives  his  instruction.  There  she 
is  found  ;  and  when  Paul  is  brought  before  the  tribunal  she 
is  sent  for,  too ;  but  when  examined  by  the  proconsul  she 
makes  no  answer,  having  no  eyes  or  ears  for  any  but  Paul. 
Though  the  proconsul  had  been  willing  to  listen  to  the  Chris 
tian  doctrine  preached  by  Paul,  he  now  condemns  him  as  a 
magician,  and  has  him  whipped  out  of  the  city.  As  for  Thecla, 
her  own  mother  pronounces  that  she  ought  to  be  burned,  in 
order  that  other  women  might  learn  not  to  follow  so  bad  an 
example  ;  and  burned  she  accordingly  would  have  been  if  the 
pyre  had  not  miraculously  been  quenched.  Escaping  from 
the  city,  Thecla  finds  Paul,  who  with  his  company  had  been 

*  On  this  description  have  been  founded  the  representations  of  Paul's 
appearance  given  by  several  later  writers.  The  following  is  Kenan's  ver 
sion  :  'II  etait  laid,  de  courte  taille,  epais  et  voute.  Ses  fortes  epaules 
portaient  bizarrement  une  tete  petite  et  chauve.  Sa  face  bleme  etait 
comme  envahie  par  une  barbe  epaisse,  un  nez  aquilin,  des  yeux  pendants 
des  sourcils  noirs  qui  se  rejoignaient  sur  le  front.' — Les  Apotres,  p.  170. 


360  APOCRYPHAL   ACTS    OF   THE   APOSTLES.  [XIX. 

fasting  and  praying  for  her  deliverance.  Onesiphorus  was 
with  him,  but  he  had  parted  with  all  his  goods  ;  so  when,  after 
six  days'  fasting,  they  can  hold  out  no  longer,  Paul  has  to  sell 
his  upper  garment  in  order  to  buy  the  bread  and  herbs  which, 
with  water,  constituted  their  fare.  Thecla  begs  that  she  may 
travel  with  Paul  whithersoever  he  went ;  but  he  replies, '  Nay, 
for  the  time  is  evil,  and  thou  of  fair  form,  lest  another 
temptation  worse  than  the  former  come  on  thee  and  thou  not 
be  able  to  resist.'  *  Give  me,'  she  said,  '  the  seal  in  Christ, 
and  no  temptation  shall  touch  me.'  And  Paul  answered, 
*  Thecla,  be  patient,  and  thou  shalt  receive  the  water.' 

She  accompanies  him  then  to  Antioch,  where  her  beauty 
excites  the  passion  of  the  Syriarch  Alexander,  and  brings  on 
her  new  trials.  In  consequence  of  her  resistance  to  him,  she 
is  brought  before  the  governor,  and  condemned  to  the  wild 
beasts.  In  the  meantime  she  obtains  that  the  virginity  for 
which  she  was  willing  to  undergo  so  much  should  be  preserved, 
and  is  committed  to  the  charge  of  a  lady,  Tryphaena,  who  later 
in  the  story  is  spoken  of  as  a  queen  and  as  a  relation  of  the 
emperor.  Tryphaena  receives  her  to  take  the  place  of  her 
deceased  daughter,  and  Thecla  requites  the  service  by  effica 
cious  prayers,  which  transfer  the  soul  of  this  dead  heathen  to 
the  place  of  bliss.  The  lioness  to  whom  Thecla  is  first  ex 
posed  not  only  licks  her  feet  and  refuses  to  touch  her,  but 
defends  her  against  the  other  animals  let  loose  on  her.  But 
when,  after  having  killed  some  of  the  assailants,  the  faithful 
lioness  herself  is  slain,  Thecla,  seeing  no  further  escape,  jumps 
into  a  tank  where  seals  are  kept,  crying,  as  she  does  so,  '  I  am 
baptized  in  the  name  of  Jesus  Christ  for  the  Last  Day.'  There 
upon  the  sea  monsters  fall  dead,  and  Thecla  is  surrounded 
with  a  cloud  of  fire,  so  that  neither  can  the  beasts  touch  her 
nor  her  nakedness  be  seen.  I  need  not  pursue  the  history. 
When  Paul  takes  leave  of  her,  he  bids  her  go  teach  the  word 
of  God ;  and  she  continues  to  a  great  age  at  Seleucia,  living 
on  herbs  and  water,  and  there  enlightening  many  people  with 
the  word  of  God.  Unless  the  last  e^wrto-ev  is  to  be  understood 
to  mean  '  baptized,'  there  is  no  mention  in  the  Acts,  as  they 
stand  now,  ofThecla's  baptizing  anyone  but  herself.  Jerome, 
however,  speaks  contemptuously  of  the  Acts  of  Thecla,  as 


XIX.]  THE   ACTS   OF   PAUL  AND   THECLA.  361 

containing  a  story  of  a  baptized  lion  (De  Viris  Illust.  7). 
Either  this  was  a  hallucination  of  memory  on  Jerome's  part 
(which  I  think  by  no  means  impossible,  his  story  being  ab 
solutely  without  confirmation),  or  this  incident  was  expurgated 
from  the  version  of  these  Acts  which  has  reached  us. 

If  we  had  not  Tertullian's  testimony  that  these  Acts  were 
composed  by  a  Church  presbyter,  against  whom  he  brings  no 
charge  of  heresy,  I  should  certainly  refer  them  to  the  class  of 
Gnostic  Acts,  with  which  they  have  many  features  in  common. 
The  exaltation  of  virginity  seems  to  proceed  as  far  as  to  a 
condemnation  of  marriage,  and  to  a  denial  to  married  persons 
of  a  share  in  the  Resurrection.  The  account  of  the  Apostolic 
company  abandoning  their  worldly  goods,  and  living  on 
bread  and  water,  has  certainly  an  Encratite  complexion. 
There  is  an  account  of  an  appearance  to  Thecla  of  our  Lord 
in  Paul's  form  which  much  resembles  what  we  read  in  con 
fessedly  Gnostic  Acts  ;  while  also  a  favourite  incident  in  such 
Acts  is  the  obedience  of  brute  animals  to  the  word  of  the 
Christian  preachers.  I  think  these  Acts  must  have  possessed 
these  features  from  the  first;  for  I  know  no  example  of  Gnostic 
recasting  of  Acts  originally  orthodox.  Neither  again  can  I 
look  on  these  Acts  as  an  orthodox  recasting  of  Gnostic  Acts  ; 
for  I  find  nothing  in  them  which  looks  like  a  softening  of 
something  originally  more  heretical.  I  therefore  accept  the 
present  as  the  original  form  of  the  Acts,  and  am  willing  to 
believe,  on  Tertullian's  authority,  that  they  were  the  work  of 
a  Church  presbyter.  But  I  think  he  must  have  worked  on 
Gnostic  lines.  From  the  manner  in  which  Tertullian  speaks, 
I  should  date  the  composition  of  the  Acts  which  he  rejects 
some  twenty  or  thirty  years  before  his  own  time — that  is, 
about  170  or  180 — and  I  believe  that  by  that  time  Gnostic 
Acts  had  been  published  which  might  have  served  this  writer 
as  a  model.  I  think  that  if  the  tendency  of  the  work  had  been 
felt  by  the  Church  of  the  time  to  be  quite  unobjectionable,  the 
author  would  scarcely  have  been  deposed  for  his  composition 
of  what  he  could  have  represented  as  an  edifying  fiction  not 
intended  to  deceive.  But  there  is  nothing  surprising  in  the 
fact  that  anything  of  heretical  aspect  in  the  book  should 
afterwards  be  overlooked  or  condoned.  Some  extravagance 


362  APOCRYPHAL   ACTS   OF   THE   APOSTLES.  [XIX. 

of  statement  is  easily  pardoned  to  good  men  struggling 
against  real  evils.  At  the  present  day,  one  point  of  Encra- 
tite  doctrine — the  absolute  unlawfulness  of  the  use  of  wine — 
is  insisted  on  by  men  who  find  sympathy  and  respect  from 
many  who  cannot  be  persuaded  that  the  lawfulness  of  use  is 
disproved  by  the  possibility  of  abuse.  At  the  end  of  the 
second  century  it  was  not  merely  that  Christians  saw  their 
brethren  in  danger  of  being  seduced  by  the  immoralities  of 
heathendom,  '  lasciviousness,  lusts,  excess  of  wine,  revellings, 
banquetings,  and  abominable  idolatries  ; '  there  were  those 
who  laid  claim  to  the  Christian  name  who  covered  that  name 
with  disgrace.  A  later  school  of  Gnostics  drew  from  the 
doctrine  of  the  essential  evil  of  matter  quite  different  con 
sequences  from  those  of  their  ascetic  predecessors.  Instead 
of  hoping  by  mortification  of  the  body  to  lighten  the  weight 
that  pressed  down  the  soul,  those  men  taught  that  it  was  folly 
to  strive  to  purify  what  was  in  its  nature  impure  beyond 
remedy.  He  who  was  truly  enlightened  would  have  know 
ledge  to  perceive  that  the  soul  could  not  be  affected  by  the 
deeds  of  its  grosser  companion,  but  that  he  might  give  the 
flesh  the  gratification  which  it  craved,  and  fear  not  that  his 
spirit  should  suffer  defilement.  If  men,  fighting  against  these 
abominations,  forgot  caution  and  moderation,  they  would  not 
be  judged  very  harshly. 

The  extant  Acts  agree  very  well  with  Tertullian's  account 
that  their  author  was  a  presbyter  of  Asia ;  for  it  is  in  Asia 
Minor,  and  in  those  parts  of  it  which  adjoin  Asia  proper,  that 
the  scene  of  nearly  the  whole  story  is  laid.  Von  Gutschmid 
has  made  interesting  researches,  showing  that  the  names  of 
royal  personages  which  occur  in  apocryphal  Acts  are  often 
those  of  real  people  ;  and  he  has  proved  by  the  evidence  of 
coins  that  there  really  was  a  Queen  Tryphaena,  who  conceiv 
ably  might  have  been  in  Antioch  at  the  time  of  Paul's  visit.* 
I  have  only  to  remark,  in  conclusion,  that  these  Acts  show  no 

*  '  Die  Konigsnamen  in  den  apokryphen  Apostelgeschichten '  (Rhein. 
Museum,  1864,  xix.  1 78).  She  was  the  divorced  wife  of  Polemo  II.,  king  of 
Bosporus ;  and  Gutschmid  ingeniously  gives  reasons  for  thinking  that  she 
was  a  descendant  of  the  celebrated  Cleopatra  and  Mark  Antony,  so  that 
she  and  the  Emperor  Claudius  had  a  common  ancestor. 


XIX.]  THE   ACTS   OF   ST.   THOMAS.  363 

signs  of  acquaintance  with  any  struggle  between  Paulinists 
and.anti-Paulinists,  the  author  being  evidently  unconscious 
that  there  can  be  any  in  the  Church  who  do  not  share  his 
admiration  for  Paul. 

III.  In  order  to  let  you  better  see  the  affinities  of  the  story 
of  Thecla  with  Gnostic  Acts,  I  take  next  in  order  the  Acts 
of  St.  Thomas,  the  remains  of  which  are  very  complete,  and 
their  Gnostic  character  beyond  mistake.  They  include,  in 
deed,  some  hymns,  copied  in  all  simplicity  by  orthodox 
transcribers,  who,  being  ignorant  of  Gnostic  mythology, 
did  not  understand  what  was  meant,  but  which  betray  their 
heretical  origin  at  once  to  those  who  are  acquainted  with 
Gnostic  speculations. 

Among  the  books  read  by  Photius*  (Bill.  114),  was  a 
volume  purporting  to  be  written  by  Leucius  Charinus,  and 
containing  the  travels  f  of  Peter,  John,  Andrew,  Thomas, 
and  Paul.  Photius  describes  the  book  as  both  foolish  and 
heretical.  It  taught  the  existence  of  two  Gods — an  evil  one, 
the  God  of  the  Jews,  having  Simon  Magus  for  his  minister ; 
and  a  good  one,  whom,  confounding  the  Divine  Persons,  it 
identified  with  Christ.  It  denied  the  reality  of  Christ's  In 
carnation,  and  gave  a  docetic  account  of  His  life  on  earth, 
and  in  particular  of  His  crucifixion  ;  it  condemned  marriage, 
and  regarded  all  generation  as  the  work  of  the  evil  principle; 
and  it  told  several  silly  and  childish  stories.  We  can  satis 
factorily  trace  these  Acts  back  to  the  fourth  century  by  means 
of  references  in  writers  of  that  date.  At  that  time  they  were 
chiefly  in  use  among  the  Manicheans  ;  yet  there  are  grounds 
for  looking  on  them  as  more  ancient  than  that  heresy,  which 


*  Photius,  Patriarch  of  Constantinople,  A.D.  858,  had  previously  been 
sent  by  the  Emperor  on  an  embassy  to  Bagdad.  For  the  information  of 
his  brother  Tarasius,  with  whom  he  had  been  in  the  habit  of  reading,  he 
made  abstracts  of  the  contents  of  the  books  he  read  during  his  absence, 
criticizing  their  style  and  doctrine,  and  sometimes  giving  extracts  from 
them.  Thus  was  formed  his  Bibliotheca,  containing  an  account  of  no  fewer 
than  280  different  works,  a  book  which  fills  us  with  admiration  of  the 
ability  and  learning  of  this  indefatigable  student,  and  to  which  we  owe 
our  knowledge  of  several  works  now  no  longer  extant. 

t  The  stichometry  of  Nicephorus  (see  p.  178)  contains  a  record  of  the 
number  of  arixoi  in  the  travels  of  Peter,  John,  and  Thomas,  respectively, 
viz.  2750,  2600,  1700. 


364  APOCRYPHAL   ACTS   OF   THE   APOSTLES.  [XIX. 

only  began  towards  the  end  of  the  third  century.  We  do  not 
find,  indeed,  the  name  of  Leucius  in  any  writer  earlier  than 
the  fourth  century;  yet  earlier  writers  show  acquaintance  with 
stories  which  we  know  to  have  been  in  the  Leucian  Acts  ; 
whence  the  conclusion  has  been  drawn,  which  seems  to  me 
a  probable  one,  that  these  Acts  are  really  a  second  century 
production,  and  that  they  found  favour  with  the  Manicheans 
on  account  of  the  affinity  of  their  doctrines. 

It  is  mainly  for  the  light  they  throw  on  Gnostic  ideas  that 
the  Acts  of  Thomas  deserve  to  be  studied;  for  they  are  a  mere 
romance,  without  any  historic  value.  The  name  Thomas 
signifies  '  twin/  and  in  these  Acts  the  Apostle's  proper  name 
is  given  as  Judas.  The  name  Judas  Thomas  appears  also  in 
the  Edessan  Acts,  and  may  have  been  derived  from  these. 
But  in  these  Acts  we  are  startled  to  find  that  the  twin  of  the 
Apostle  is  no  other  than  our  Blessed  Lord  Himself,  the  like 
ness  of  the  two  being  such  as  to  cause  one  to  be  taken  for 
the  other.  I  have  already  noticed  the  parallel  story  of  the 
appearance  of  our  Lord  to  Thecla  under  the  shape  of  Paul. 
The  Acts  begin  by  telling  how  the  Apostles  cast  lots  for  the 
quarter  of  the  world  to  which  each  was  to  preach  the  Gospel, 
and  that  India  fell  to  the  lot  of  Thomas.  This  story  of  a 
division  of  the  field  of  labour  among  the  Apostles  by  lot*  is 
very  ancient.  It  was  known  to  Eusebius  (H.  E.  iii.  i),  who, 
in  the  passage  referred  to,  is  quoting  Origen.  It  is  note 
worthy  that  Eusebius  there  names  the  districts  obtained  by 
the  very  five  Apostles  whose  travels  are  said  by  Photius  to 
have  been  related  by  Leucius.  He  assigns  their  districts — 
Parthia  to  Thomas,  Scythia  to  Andrew,  Asia  to  John.  Origen's 
account  of  the  mission  of  the  other  two  Apostles  has  the  air 
of  being  rather  taken  from  the  Bible  than  from  Apocryphal 
Acts,  viz.  Peter  to  the  Jews  dispersed  in  Pontus,  Galatia, 
Cappadocia,  Asia,  and  Bithynia;  St.  Paul,  from  Jerusalem 
round  about  to  Illyricum ;  it  being  added  that  both  Apostles 
ended  their  lives  by  martyrdom  at  Rome.  In  the  Gnostic 
Acts  the  allotment  of  labour  among  the  Apostles  is  regarded 


*  I  think  Lipsius  is  right  in  supposing  that  this  story  was  suggested  by 
the  casting  of  lots  (Acts  i.  23). 


XIX.]  THE   ACTS   OF   ST.   THOMAS.  365 

as  having  happened  very  soon  after  the  Ascension ;  but  what 
is  apparently  an  earlier  account  represents  the  Apostles  as 
forbidden  to  leave  Jerusalem  for  twelve*  years.  Such  is  the 
account  of  the  second-century  writer  Apollonius  (JEuseb.  v.  1 8) ; 
and  we  learn  from  Clement  of  Alexandria  (Strom,  vi.  5),  that 
the  story  was  contained  in  the  apocryphal  Preaching  of  Peter 
and  Paul. 

The  Acts  of  Thomas  relate  that  when  India  fell  to  the  lot 
of  that  Apostle  he  refused  to  go,  notwithstanding  that  our 
Lord,  in  a  vision,  encouraged  him.  He  was  weak  in  the 
flesh,  and  how  should  a  Hebrew  preach  the  truth  to  the 
Indians  ?  It  happened  that  there  was  then  in  Jerusalem  a 
merchant  from  India,  charged  by  King  Gundaphorusf  to 
buy  him  a  carpenter.  Our  Lord  met  this  man,  and  told 
him  He  could  sell  him  a  slave  of  His,  who  was  a  very  good 
workman,  and  He  sold  him  Thomas  accordingly.  The  mer 
chant  finding  Thomas,  showed  him  Jesus,  and  asked  him, 
1  Is  this  your  master  ? '  '  Yes,  he  is  my  Lord/  was  the  reply. 
'  Then  I  have  bought  you  from  Him.'  So  Thomas  acquiesced 
in  his  Lord's  will. 

The  first  recorded  incident  of  his  travels  is  that,  at  a  city 
where  the  ship  touched,  the  King  was  making  a  marriage  for 
his  only  daughter ;  and  everyone,  rich  or  poor,  bond  or  free, 
native  or  foreigner,  was  required  to  attend  the  feast.  I  can 
not  delay  to  tell  what  took  place  at  it,  save  that  Thomas  re 
fused  to  eat  or  to  drink.  But,  in  consequence  of  a  miracle  J 
which  he  performed,  he  was  brought  in  by  the  King  to  bless 
the  newly-married  couple.  When  strangers  had  retired  from 
the  chamber,  and  the  bridegroom  lifted  the  curtain  which 
separated  him  from  his  bride,  he  saw  Thomas,  as  he  sup 
posed,  conversing  with  her.  Then  he  asked  in  surprise, 
*  How  canst  thou  be  found  here  ?  Did  I  not  see  thee  go 
out  before  all  ? '  And  the  Lord  answered,  '  I  am  not  Judas 
Thomas,  but  his  brother.'  Thereupon  He  made  them  sit 

*  The  Clementine  Recognitions  say  seven  (i.  43,  ix.  29). 

t  Von  Gutschmid  finds  that  this  is  the  name  of  a  real  person,  and  hence 
concludes  that  the  story  must  be  more  ancient  than  the  Manicheans,  who 
would  not  have  been  likely  to  know  this  name. 

J  The  story  of  this  miracle  is  three  times  referred  to  by  St.  Augustine : 
Cont.  Faust,  xxii.  79  ;  adv.  Adimant.  xvii.  2  ;  De  Serm.  Dom.  intnontexx.. 


366  APOCRYPHAL   ACTS    OF   THE   APOSTLES.  [XIX. 

down,  and  called  on  them  to  remember  what  His  brother 
had  said  to  them.  He  taught  them  all  the  anxieties,  troubles, 
and  temptations  which  result  from  the  procreation  of  chil 
dren,  and  promised  them  that  if  they  kept  themselves  chaste 
they  should  partake  of  the  true  marriage,  and  enter  the  bride- 
chamber  full  of  light  and  immortality.  The  young  couple 
obey  this  exhortation,  much  to  the  grief  of  the  King  when 
he  learns  their  resolution.  He  orders  Thomas  to  be  appre 
hended,  but  he  had  sailed  away. 

When  Thomas  arrives  in  India,  he  is  brought  before  the 
King,  and  being  questioned  as  to  his  knowledge  of  masons' 
or  carpenters'  work  professes  great  skill  in  either  department. 
The  King  asks  him  if  he  can  build  him  a  palace.  He  replies 
that  he  can,  and  makes  a  plan  which  is  approved  of.  He  is 
then  commissioned  to  build  the  palace,  and  is  supplied  abun 
dantly  with  money  for  the  work,  which,  however,  he  says  he 
cannot  begin  till  the  winter  months.  The  King  thinks  this 
strange,  but  being  convinced  of  his  skill,  acquiesces.  But 
when  the  King  goes  away,  Thomas,  instead  of  building, 
employs  himself  in  preaching  the  Gospel,  and  spends  all 
the  money  on  the  poor.  After  a  time  the  King  sends  to 
know  how  the  work  is  going  on.  Thomas  sends  back  word 
that  the  palace  is  finished  all  but  the  roof,  for  which  he  must 
have  more  money ;  and  this  is  supplied  accordingly,  and  is 
spent  by  Thomas  on  the  widows  and  orphans  as  before.  At 
length  the  King  returns  to  the  city,  and,  when  he  makes  in 
quiry  about  the  palace,  he  learns  that  Thomas  has  never  done 
anything  but  go  about  preaching,  giving  alms  to  the  poor, 
and  healing  diseases.  He  seemed  to  be  a  magician,  yet  he 
never  took  money  for  his  cures ;  lived  on  bread  and  water, 
with  salt,  and  had  but  one  garment.  The  King,  in  great 
anger,  sent  for  Thomas.  '  Have  you  built  me  my  palace  ? ' 
'  Yes.'  '  Let  me  see  it.'  '  Oh,  you  can't  see  it  now,  but  you 
will  see  it  when  you  go  out  of  this  world.'  Enraged  at  being 
thus  mocked,  the  King  committed  Thomas  to  prison,  until 
he  could  devise  some  terrible  form  of  death  for  him.  But 
that  same  night  the  King's  brother  died,  and  his  soul  was 
taken  up  by  the  angels  to  see  all  the  heavenly  habitations. 
They  asked  him  in  which  he  would  like  to  dwell.  But  when 


XIX.]  THE   ACTS    OF   ST.    THOMAS.  367 

he  saw  the  palace  which  Thomas  had  built,  he  desired  to 
dwell  in  none  but  that.  When  he  learned  that  it  belonged 
to  his  brother,  he  begged  and  obtained  that  he  might  return 
to  life  in  order  that  he  might  buy  it  from  him.  So  as  they 
were  putting  grave-clothes  on  the  body,  it  returned  to  life. 
He  sent  for  the  King,  whose  love  for  him  he  knew,  and  im 
plored  him  to  sell  him  the  palace.  But  when  the  King  learned 
the  truth  about  it,  he  refused  to  sell  the  mansion  he  hoped  to 
inhabit  himself,  but  consoled  his  brother  with  the  promise 
that  Thomas,  who  was  still  alive,  should  build  him  a  better 
one.  The  two  brothers  then  receive  instruction,  and  are 
baptized.  We  learn  here  some  interesting  details  about  the 
Gnostic  rites,  and  the  agreement  of  the  ritual  with  that 
described  by  Cyril  of  Jerusalem  shows  that,  though  most 
of  the  words  of  the  prayers  put  into  the  Apostle's  mouth 
may  be  regarded  as  the  invention  of  the  heretical  composer 
of  the  Acts,  much  of  the  ritual,  and  possibly  even  some  of 
the  words,  simply  represent  the  usage  of  the  Church  before 
these  Encratites  branched  off,  and  which  they  retained  after 
their  separation. 

Oil  has  so  prominent  a  place  in  this  ritual,  that  it  was 
supposed  among  the  orthodox  that  the  heretics,  from  whom 
these  Acts  emanated,  baptized  with  oil,  not  with  water.*  But 
though  in  one  case  no  mention  is  made  of  water  baptism,  it 
may  be  gathered  from  the  fuller  account  of  other  baptisms 
that  it  was  not  omitted.  It  is,  indeed,  sometimes  difficult  to 
know,  when  receiving  the  '  seal '  is  spoken  of,  whether  the 
application  of  oil  or  of  water  is  intended.  Thus,  in  one  place 
(19,  30,  Bonnet's  ed.),  we  have  Se£ovrai  rty  cr^paytSa  TOV  Xovrpov, 
and  immediately  after  (20,  9)  wo.  Sto.  TOV  e\aiov  Se£ovrai  rrjv 
o-^payiSa.  But  the  explanation,  no  doubt,  is  that  the  use  both 
of  the  oil  and  the  water  were  looked  on  as  essential  to  the 
rite ;  and  in  the  passage  referred  to  an  incident  is  represented 
as  having  occurred  after  the  candidates  had  been  sealed,  but 
before  they  had  received  TO  €7rio-<£/3ayioyx,a  TTJS  cr^paytSos.  The 
baptismal  ceremony  commenced  with  the  pouring  of  oil  on 
the  candidate's  head  by  the  Apostle,  with  words  of  benedic- 

*  Turibius,  Epist.  ad  Idacium  et  Ceponium. 


368  APOCRYPHAL   ACTS    OF   THE   APOSTLES.  [XIX. 

tion ;  but  throughout  he  is  not  represented  as  confining 
himself  to  a  definite  form  of  sacramental  words,  different 
forms  being  represented  as  used  on  different  occasions.  In 
these  Acts  the  forms  of  prayer,  requesting  our  Lord's  presence 
in  the  consecrated  oil,  are  much  stronger  than  those  with 
regard  to  the  consecrated  bread,  e.g.  (82,  6) 
TW  eAa/a)  Kara^ioxTOv  rovTO)  cis  o  Kal  TO  (Tov  ayiov 
ovofj.a.  (compare  Cyril.  Hier.  Catech.  xxi.  3).  After  oil  had 
been  poured  on  the  head  took  place  the  anointing  of  the 
candidates :  that  is,  as  I  suppose,  the  application  of  oil  with 
the  sign  of  the  cross  to  different  parts  of  the  body.  I  find  no 
trace  that  different  unguent  was  used  on  the  two  occasions, 
though  this  was  afterwards  the  practice.  Thus  (Const 7.  App. 
vii.  22),  xpicreis  Trpwrov  TO>  eXato)  ayt'a>,  cTrctra  /SaTrnVeis  vSari, 
/cat  TcXevrcuov  <r<£/oayi'creis  /xv'pw  (see  also  Cyril.  Hier.  xx.  3, 
and  xxi.  3).  In  these  authorities,  and  in  later  practice,  this 
anointing  comes  after  the  baptism,  and  not  before.  In  one 
place  in  these  Acts  we  have  the  phrase  dAefyas  KOL  xpi'cra?, 
where  the  latter  word  seems  to  refer  to  the  pouring  of  oil  on 
the  head,  the  former  to  the  smearing  of  the  unguent  on  the 
body.  Cyril's  usage  is  the  reverse.  Xpi'eiv  is  the  ordinary 
O.  T.  word  for  the  ceremonial  anointing  of  priests,  kings, 
&c.  In  the  case  of  female  candidates,  the  Apostle  himself 
only  pours  the  oil  on  the  head,  but  leaves  the  subsequent 
anointing  to  the  women. 

After  the  anointing  followed  the  baptism  with  water  in 
the  name  of  the  Father,  Son,  and  Holy  Ghost.  Apparently 
immersion  was  used,  for  the  candidates  were  completely 
stripped,  with  the  exception  of  a  linen  waist-cloth  (Cyril, 
xx.  2).  When  a  fountain  could  not  be  had,  water  was 
brought  in  in  a  trough  (cr/ca^).  We  may  gather  from 
Herodotus,  iv.  73,  that  it  would  be  possible  for  the  candidate 
to  lie  down  in  such  a  vessel.* 

After  the  baptism  those  who  had  been  sealed  received  the 
Eucharist.  In  most  places  the  impression  is  conveyed  that 
no  wine  was  used,  and  that  it  consisted  of  bread  and  water 


*  Du  Cange  in  his  Glossary  gives  oW^T?,  with  the  Romaic  diminutive 
o-/fo0i5o7rouAo,  as  names  for  a  baptismal  font. 


XIX.]  THE  ACTS   OF   ST.   THOMAS.  369 

only.  In  one  place,  however,  the  materials  brought  in  for 
the  feast  are  /c/oao-iv  voWos  KOL  aprov  era ;  and  the  word  Kpao-is 
suggests  a  mixture  of  wine.  After  the  bread  was  blessed, 
the  sign  of  the  cross  was  made  on  it,  and  it  was  distributed 
with  some  such  words  as,  'This  be  unto  thee  for  the 
remission  of  sins;'  but,  as  already  stated,  there  is  con 
siderable  variety  in  the  words  reported  to  have  been  used 
on  different  occasions.  We  read  more  than  once  of  a 
supernatural  voice  uttering  the  '  Amen.'  In  Justin  Martyr's 
account  of  the  Christian  ritual  (Apol.  i.  65)  I  understand  him 
to  describe  the  people  as  joining  vocally  in  the  earlier  prayers, 
which  therefore  must  have  been  prescribed  forms;  but  the 
Eucharistic  thanksgiving  as  uttered  by  the  president  alone, 
and  as  it  would  seem,  extempore,  the  people  at  the  end 
expressing  their  assent  by  an  Amen.  St.  Paul  plainly  refers 
to  this  mode  of  worship  (i  Cor.  xiv.  16),  and  its  antiquity  is 
proved  by  its  being  found  in  the  earliest  heretical  sects.  We 
learn  from  an  extract  preserved  by  Irenaeus  (i.  x.  i)  that  in 
the  second  century  the  heretic  Marcus  uses  as  an  illustration 
the  sound  made  when  all  uttered  the  Amen  together.*  It 
need  not  surprise  us  therefore  to  find  the  Amen  here. 

But  a  tale  is  told  showing  the  danger  of  receiving  un 
worthily.  A  youth,  who  had  committed  a  grievous  sin,  was 
'  convicted  by  the  Eucharist/  for  on  his  partaking  of  the  holy 
food  both  his  hands  withered.  Being  called  on  to  confess, 
he  owned  that  he  had  been  enamoured  of  a  woman :  but 
having  been  converted  by  the  Apostle,  and  having  learned 
from  him  that  he  could  not  have  life  if  he  partook  of  carnal 
intercourse,  he  had  received  the  seal,  and  had  endeavoured 
to  prevail  on  the  woman  he  loved  to  dwell  with  him  in 
chastity.  But,  on  her  refusing  to  pledge  herself  to  con 
tinence,  he  thought  he  had  done  a  good  work  in  slaying  her, 
for  he  could  not  bear  the  thought  of  her  being  polluted 
by  another.  No  difficulty  is  raised  as  to  the  forgiveness  of 
post-baptismal  sin.  The  Apostle  heals  the  young  man  and 
restores  the  woman  to  life,  who  anticipates  Dante  in  relating 

*  A  couple  of  centuries  later  St.  Jerome  speaks  of  the  thunder  of  the 
Christian  Amen :  '  ad  similitudinem  caelestis  tonitrui  Amen  reboat'  (Prooem. 
in  Galat.  Lib.  2). 

2  B 


370  APOCRYPHAL  ACTS   OF  THE   APOSTLES.  [XIX. 

what  she  had  witnessed  of  the  varieties  of  punishment  in 
the  unseen  world. 

It  would  be  tedious  to  go  through  all  the  stories.  Suffice 
it  to  say  that  the  appearance  of  our  Lord  in  the  form  of 
Thomas  is  more  than  once  repeated ;  and  that  there  are,  as 
in  other  Gnostic  Acts,  tales  of  miracles  performed  on  the 
brute  creation.  In  a  work  of  this  nature  we  read  without 
surprise  that  when  on  a  journey  the  horses  are  unable  to 
proceed,  the  wild  asses  of  the  desert  obeyed  the  Apostle's 
summons,  and  picked  out  the  four  strongest  of  their  number 
to  take  the  place  of  the  exhausted  horses ;  but  it  exceeds  the 
bounds  even  of  hagiological  probability  that  at  the  end  of 
his  journey  Thomas  should  employ  one  of  the  wild  asses  as 
his  curate,  to  exorcise  a  demon  and  to  preach  a  sermon. 
One  of  the  tales  which  moved  the  contempt  of  Photius  was 
another  story  of  a  speaking  ass,  who  claimed  relationship 
with  Balaam's,  and  with  the  ass  who  bore  our  Lord.* 

The  journey  which  I  have  mentioned  results  in  the  mar 
tyrdom  of  Thomas.  He  converts  the  wife  of  the  chief 
minister  of  the  sovereign  of  the  country,  who,  in  obedience 
to  the  Apostle's  instructions,!  refuses  further  intercourse  with 
her  husband.  He  complains  to  the  King,  but  the  result  is 
that  the  King's  own  wife  and  son  become  converts  to  the 
same  doctrine.  Thomas  has,  by  his  miracles,  gained  such 
estimation  among  the  people  that  the  King  dares  not  order 
his  public  execution,  but  by  his  command  the  four  soldiers 
who  guarded  the  Apostle  pierce  him  to  death  with  their 
spears.  And  this  occasions  a  remark  which  is  worth  quoting 
as  exhibiting  the  docetic  denial  of  the  truth  that  our  Lord 
had  a  body  like  ours.  Thomas  observes  that  it  was  fitting 
that  his  body,  which  was  made  of  four  elements,  should  be 
pierced  by  four  spears,  but  our  Lord's  body  only  by  one. 

*  Philaster  also  (H<zr.  88)  notes  it  as  a  characteristic  of  the  Gnostic 
Acts  :  'ut  pecudes  et  canes  et  bestiae  loquerentur.' 

f  Of  these  instructions  the  following  is  a  specimen : — OVK  w(pe\-fjffei  <rot 
T)  KOivuvia  •})  pvirapa  T)  irpbs  Tbv  ffbv  &t>5pa  yivo(j.evr)'  Kal  y&p  avrr)  airocr- 
repe'i  curb  rys  Koivusvias  rys  aXiiQivys.  The  husband,  therefore,  is  guilty  of 
no  misrepresentation  when  he  complains,  6  ir\dvos  e/ce?»/os  TOVTO  SiSdffKfi, 
Iva.  /TTJ  ris  yvvatKl  irpoffOfju^ffri  tSta,  &  T]  (pvffis  ciTratTeti/  ot'Sev,  Kal  Oebs  Ivo/no- 
,  avrbs  avarpeirei. 


XIX.]  THE   ACTS   OF   ST.   THOMAS.  371 

Notwithstanding  the  docetic  tinge  of  the  passage  just 
quoted,  very  orthodox  language  is  elsewhere  used  as  to  our 
Lord's  twofold  nature.  He  is  addressed  as'I^o-ov  6  eTraraTravo- 
/xevos  ctTTo  rfjs  68oi7ropias  TOV  /ca/^arov  a>s  av#/3U>7ros  KOL  eirl  rots 
KVfjLa(TL  -TTCptTraTuV  ws  #eos,  And  again,  6  fj,ovoyevr)<s  VTrdpxwv,  6 

TTpOJTOTOKOS    TToXXcOV    dSeX^WV,    $€€    €K    6fOV    Vlj/lCTTOV,    6    ttV^/OCOTTOS    6 

KaTa</>/3ovov/*,evo9  ?<os  a/art.  You  will  have  noticed  the  use  made 
in  this  quotation  of  St.  John's  Gospel  and  of  the  Epistle  to 
the  Romans ;  and  in  fact  these  Acts  make  copious  use  of  the 
New  Testament ;  of  the  Gospels,  including  John,  several 
times,  the  Acts,  the  Pauline  Epistles,  including  the  Epistle 
to  the  Ephesians  frequently,  and  both  Epistles  to  Timothy, 
the  Epistle  to  the  Hebrews,  the  First  Epistles  both  of  St. 
Peter  and  St.  John,  and  the  Apocalypse. 

There  is  nothing  in  the  facts  just  stated  which  forbids  us 
to  believe  these  Acts  to  have  been  earlier  than  the  time  of 
Origen.  The  language  used  concerning  our  Lord's  twofold 
nature  resembles  that  employed  by  Melito  ;*  and  all  the  New 
Testament  books  quoted  were  in  full  use  at  the  end  of  the 
second  century.  For  instance,  I  see  nothing  either  in  the 
Christology  or  in  the  New  Testament  Canon  of  these  Acts 
which  would  make  it  impossible  to  believe  that  they  were 
written  by  Tatian.f  Not  that  I  in  the  least  believe  that  this 
writer  was  capable  of  inventing  the  ridiculous  stories  which 
these  Acts  contain ;  yet  we  can  learn  from  them  what  were 
the  notions  prevalent  among  the  Encratites  to  whom  Tatian 
joined  himself.  And  the  word  Gnostic  is  one  of  such  very 
wide  application,  being  given  to  some  whom  we  should 
hardly  own  as  Christians  at  all,  that  it  is  interesting  to 
learn  how  much  of  Catholic  doctrine  was  held  by  the  Gnostic 
sects  which  were  nearest  to  the  Church.  The  Encratites  were 
especially  formidable  towards  the  end  of  the  second  century, 

*  Otto' s  Apologists,  Fragments  vi.,  xiii.,  &c. 

t  A  limit  to  the  antiquity  of  these  Acts  is  placed  by  the  fact  that  the 
martyrdom  of  Thomas  was  unknown  to  the  Valentinian  Heracleon,  whose 
date  may  be  roughly  placed  at  170.  Heracleon,  quoted  by  Clem.  Alex. 
(Strom,  iv.  9),  arguing  against  the  notion  that  the  only  way  of  confess 
ing  Christ  was  confession  before  a  magistrate,  names  Matthew,  Philip, 
and  Thomas,  as  never  having  had  occasion  to  make  this  kind  of  confes 
sion. 

2  B2 


372  APOCRYPHAL  ACTS   OF  THE  APOSTLES.  [XIX. 

and  the  controversy  with  them  occupies  a  whole  book  of  the 
Stromateis  of  Clement  of  Alexandria. 

I  should  be  disposed  to  conjecture  Syria  as  the  place  of 
manufacture  of  these  Acts.  I  have  already  noticed  their 
agreement  with  the  'Doctrine  of  Addai'  in  the  use  of  the 
name  of  Judas  Thomas;  and  the  Acts  of  Thomas  conclude 
with  telling  of  the  removal  of  the  body  of  Thomas  to 
Edessa.* 

I  have  gone  into  so  much  detail  about  the  Acts  of  Thomas 
that  I  can  say  nothing  about  those  of  Andrew,  which,  in  their 
original  form,  were  probably  of  equal  antiquity ;  or  about  the 
Acts  of  Philip,  a  later  production  of  the  same  school. 

IV.  The  Acts  of  St.  Peter. — I  have  already  (see  p.  14)  told 
you  of  the  Clementine  writings,  founded,  as  it  would  seem, 
on  an  earlier  Jewish-Christian  work,  which  related  travels 
of  Peter.  There  is  evidently  [much  room  for  difference  of 
opinion  between  critics  who,  guided  by  internal  evidence 
only,  attempt  to  separate  the  original  portions  of  a  work  from 
subsequent  accretions.  To  me  it  seems  certain  that  the 
original  'Circuits  of  Peter'  terminated  with  the  Apostle's 
arrival  at  Antioch,  beyond  which  the  existing  forms  of  the 
Clementines  do  not  proceed.  Two  or  three  allusions  to  a 
subsequent  contest  of  Peter  with  Simon  Magus  at  Rome  I 
believe  to  have  been  inserted  when  the  work  was  dressed  up 
for  Roman  circulation.  Extant  Acts  which  tell  of  the  contest 
at  Rome  are  of  later  date,  and  of  by  no  means  Ebionite  char 
acter,  associating  Peter  with  Paul  in  joint  opposition  to  the 
magician.  Those  who  have  been  trained  in  the  Tubingen 
theory  as  to  the  predominance  of  the  anti-Pauline  party  in  the 
early  Church  piously  believe  that  the  Acts  relating  the  adven 
tures  of  Peter  at  Rome  must  be  an  orthodox  recasting  of  anti- 
Pauline  Acts  now  lost,  in  which  Paul,  instead  of  opposing 
Simon,  was  himself  to  be  recognized  under  that  name.  But  of 
the  existence  of  such  Acts  there  is  not  a  particle  of  evidence, 
nor  do  I  know  of  any  passages  in  the  extant  Acts  which  sug 
gest  that  they  originally  bore  an  anti-Pauline  aspect.  Non- 

*  Rufinus  tells  (H.  E.  ii.  5),  that  Edessa  claimed  to  possess  the  body  of 
St.  Thomas. 


XIX.]  THE   ACTS   OF   ST.    PETER.  373 

Ebionite  Acts  of  Peter  are  as  old  as  the  second  century,  for 
we  learn  from  a  quotation  by  Clement  of  Alexandria  (Strom. 
vi.  5)  that  the  '  Preaching  of  Peter'  was  of  this  character.* 

In  truth,  I  consider  that  the  first  condition  for  either  tracing 
rightly  the  genesis  of  the  Petrine  legends,  or  understanding 
the  history  of  the  early  Church,  is  the  rejection  of  the 
speculations  which  Baur  has  built  on  the  fact  that  in  the 
Clementine  Homilies  Paul  is  assailed  under  the  mask  of 
Simon  Magus.  The  consequence  has  been  that  his  disciples 
cannot  hear  Simon  Magus  named  without  thinking  of  Paul. 
By  a  false  historical  perspective  they  project  the  image  of 
third-century  heretics  back  upon  the  first  ages  of  the  Church; 
and  the  climax  is  reached  by  Volkmar,  who  makes  the  Simon- 
Paul  myth  antecedent  to  Luke,  and  finds  in  Acts  viii.  a  covert 
assault  upon  the  Apostle  of  the  Gentiles. |  I  have  already  had 
occasion  to  mention  (p.  19)  that  it  is  only  in  the  Homilies, 
which  exhibit  the  latest  form  of  the  Elkesaite  legends,  that 
the  assault  on  Paul  under  the  character  of  Simon  is  to  be 
found.  The  Clementine  Recognitions,  which  contain  an  earlier 
form  of  the  same  story,  are  also  decidedly  anti-Pauline. 
Paul  figures  in  them  as  the  '  enemy,'  and  as  persecuting  the 
Church  ;  but  as  the  date  of  the  incident  is  before  his  journey 
to  Damascus,  there  is  nothing  in  the  story  that  might  not  be 
accepted  by  a  reader  fully  persuaded  of  the  truth  of  Luke's 


*  This  book  of  the  preaching  of  Peter  is  of  very  early  date.  It  is  several 
times  quoted  by  Clement,  and  was  also  used  by  Heracleon(Origeniny0a». 
torn.  xin.  17).  The  work  was  not  Ebionite,  for  it  condemned  equally  both 
false  methods  of  worshipping  God :  KO.TO,  rovs  "E\\f]vas  and  Kara  TOVS 
'lovSaiovs  (Clem.  Alex,  ubi  supra}.  It  is  now  generally  acknowledged 
(see  Grabe,  SpiciL  I.  66,  Fabricius,  Cod.,  Ap.  N.  T.  vol.  i.  800)  that  the 
book  contained  discourses  of  Paul,  as  well  as  of  Peter,  and  that  it  is  the 
same  work  as  that  called  by  pseudo-Cyprian  (De  Rebaptismate,  17)  the 
Preaching  of  Paul,  a  book  which  represented  the  two  Apostles  as  joined 
together  on  friendly  terms  at  Rome.  Lactantius  says  (Inst.  Div.  iv.  21), 
'quse  Petrus  et  Paulus  Romas  praedicaverunt ;  et  ea  prsedicatio  in  memo- 
riam  scripta  permansit.'  It  seems  to  me  likely  that  this  work  was  known 
to  Justin  Martyr,  who  twice  (Apol.  I.  20,  44)  quotes  the  prophecies  of  the 
Sibyl  and  of  Hystaspes  as  to  the  destruction  of  the  world  by  fire.  Now, 
Hystaspes  and  the  Sibyl  were  thus  coupled  in  a  discourse  ascribed  to  Paul 
cited  by  Clement  (Strom,  vi.  5)  in  connexion  with  the  Preaching  of  Peter, 
and  by  Lactantius  (Inst.  Div.  vil.  15, 18). 

t  Hilgenfeld  has  lately  written  his  recantation  of  this  theory  {Ketzergc- 
schichte,  p.  164),  and  now  owns  the  historical  character  of  Simon. 


374  APOCRYPHAL  ACTS   OF   THE   APOSTLES.  [XIX. 

narrative.  The  writer  shows  his  hostility  to  Paul  only  by 
making  no  mention  of  his  subsequent  conversion  or  his 
preaching  to  the  Gentiles.  And  none  of  the  language  which, 
in  the  Recognitions,  is  put  into  the  mouth  of  Simon  conveys 
any  reference  to  Paul.  Indeed,  the  whole  story  of  Simon, 
which  is  found  in  both  forms  of  the  Clementines,  attributes  to 
him  characteristics  with  which  Paul  has  nothing  in  common. 
The  magician  is  a  Samaritan,  he  had  been  a  disciple  of  John 
the  Baptist,  he  has  a  concubine  named  Helena,  he  works 
miracles  in  no  way  resembling  those  ascribed  to  Paul,  and  he 
arrogates  to  himself  divine  prerogatives. 

It  is  plain  that  the  use  of  a  historical  name  as  a  nickname 
implies  some  previous  knowledge  of  the  character  whose 
name  is  so  employed.  Whence,  then,  are  we  to  suppose 
that  the  Clementine  writers  obtained  their  knowledge  of 
Simon  ?  I  answer  :  in  the  first  instance  from  the  Acts  of  the 
Apostles ;  for  never,  do  I  think,  was  there  a  more  complete 
va-repov  TrpoVcpov  than  when  the  Clementines  were  used  to 
explain  the  genesis  of  the  Book  of  the  Acts.  The  Recognitions 
in  several  places  betray  a  use  of  the  Acts.  They  mention, 
for  instance,  Paul's  journey  to  Damascus;  they  know  that 
Gamaliel  took  the  Apostle's  part,  telling  the  story  in  the 
curious  form,  that  Gamaliel  was  in  truth  a  Christian,  but  had 
obtained  from  the  Apostles  a  dispensation  to  conceal  his 
faith.*  From  the  Acts,  then,  I  believe,  that  the  Clementine 
writer  drew  his  knowledge  of  Simon  as  a  Samaritan,  as  a 
magician,  and,  it  is  important  to  add,  as  one  who  had  been  a 
disciple  of  Jesus. 

As  for  the  particulars  which  the  Clementines  add  to  what 
is  told  of  Simon  in  the  Acts,  I  feel  no  doubt  that  they  were 
derived  from  Justin  Martyr.  Justin  himself  states  in  his 
Apology  that  he  was  also  the  author  of  a  work  on  heresies ; 
and  the  best  authorities  are  agreed  that  this  lost  work  of 
Justin's  formed  the  basis  of  the  treatise  on  heresy  by  Irenseus 

*  The  'Doctrine  of  Addai'  I  count  to  be  later  than  the  Clementine 
Recognitions,  and  to  be  indebted  to  them  for  some  particulars.  For  in 
stance,  it  represents  Christ  as  lodging  in  the  house  of  Gamaliel,  and  (p.  16) 
the  Apostles  as  bound  to  send  to  James  periodically  accounts  of  their 


XIX.]  THE   ACTS   OF   ST.    PETER.  375 

and  Hippolytus.  When  we  find  the  first  two  places  in  the 
list  of  heretics  assigned  to  the  two  Samaritan  heretics,  Simon 
and  Menander,  we  infer  that  the  information  was  furnished 
by  the  Samaritan  Justin,  who  duly  records  the  villages  where 
each  was  born ;  and  the  coincidences  between  the  account  of 
Simon  given  by  Irenaeus  (i.  21)  and  in  the  Clementines,  lead 
us  to  believe  that  Justin  was  the  source  of  the  latter  as  well 
as  of  the  former.  If  the  whole  Clementine  story  of  Simon  be 
later  than  Justin  Martyr,  we  evidently  can  attribute  no  great 
antiquity  to  the  identification  of  the  Clementine  Simon  with 
Paul,  which  must  be  later  still.* 

The  Acts  of  Peter  and  Paul,  as  printed  by  Tischendorf, 
are  much  later  than  the  Clementines.  Simon  appears  in  the 
character  of  a  magician,  and  performs  many  wonders  in  his 
conflict  with  the  Apostles  before  Nero.  Thus  he  offers  to 
allow  his  head  to  be  cut  off,  undertaking  in  three  days  to 
rise  again.  But  by  his  magical  power  he  deceives  the  eyes 
of  the  spectators ;  and  it  is  a  ram  which  is  made  to  assume 
his  form  and  is  beheaded.  So,  to  the  Emperor's  amazement, 
Simon  walks  in  at  the  appointed  time,  complaining,  What  a 
mess  you  have  got  here  !  Why  they  have  never  wiped  up  the 
blood  where  they  cut  off  my  head.  Finally  Simon  exhibits 
his  power  by  undertaking  to  fly  up  to  heaven  from  the  top 
of  a  lofty  tower.  But  on  the  Apostles'  adjuration,  the  evil 
angels  who  are  bearing  him  are  compelled  to  drop  him,  and 
he  is  taken  up  dead.  Yet  the  Emperor,  instead  of  being 
convinced,  orders  the  execution  of  the  two  Apostles.  But  I 
may  mention,  as  showing  the  affinity  of  these  Acts  to  those 
previously  described,  that  the  cause  of  hostility  to  the  Apostles 
is  stated  to  be  the  number  of  matrons  whom  they  had  per 
suaded  to  leave  the  society  of  their  husbands,  among  whom 
were  the  wife  of  the  Emperor's  chief  minister,  Agrippa,  and 
Nero's  own  wife,  Livia.  You  will  notice  how  the  framer 
of  the  story  has  mixed  up  the  personages  of  the  reigns  of 

*  In  my  article  SIMON  MAGUS,  in  the  Dictionary  of  Christian  Biography, 
I  give  my  reasons  for  thinking  that  there  really  was  a  Samaritan  heretical 
teacher  of  the  not  uncommon  name  of  Simon,  but  that  Justin  was  mistaken 
in  identifying  him  with  the  Simon  of  the  Acts,  and,  under  this  mistake, 
imagining  him  to  be  the  founder  of  Gnosticism. 


37^  APOCRYPHAL  ACTS   OF  THE  APOSTLES.  [XIX. 

Augustus  and  of  Nero.  There  were  Gnostic  Acts,  which  I 
regard  as  earlier  than  those  from  which  I  quote,  and  which 
contain  other  stories  of  Simon's  conflict  with  the  Apostles, 
and  legends  of  the  Apostles'  work  at  Rome,  which  it  would 
be  tedious  to  detail.  But  perhaps  I  ought  not  to  pass  by  in 
silence  the  celebrated  story  of  '  Domine  quo  vadis  ? '  Peter 
had,  by  the  advice  of  the  leading  members  of  the  Church, 
resolved  on  withdrawing  from  the  coming  persecution ;  but 
outside  the  city  he  meets  the  Lord  coming  in ;  and  on  ask 
ing  Him  whither  He  is  going,  is  answered,  To  Rome,  to  be 
again  crucified.  Thereupon  Peter,  understanding  the  rebuke, 
returns  to  fulfil  the  Lord's  command. 

I  have  said  that  the  Acts,  as  published  by  Tischendorf,  are 
not  very  ancient.  I  will  mention  two  proofs  of  this.  One  is 
that  Hippolytus,  who  wrote  about  A.D.  235,  is  ignorant  of 
the  version  of  the  death  of  Simon,  which  I  have  repeated  to 
you,  and  which  eventually  became  the  most  widely  received. 
The  story  told  by  Hippolytus  is,  that  Simon  commanded 
himself  to  be  buried,  promising  to  rise  again  in  three  days. 
And  buried  he  was;  but  buried  he  remained.  The  other  proof 
is  drawn  from  the  fact  that  in  these  Acts  the  martyrdom  of 
the  two  Apostles  is  made  to  take  place  on  the  29th  June,  the 
day  on  which  it  has  been  commemorated  for  centuries ;  for  it 
came  to  be  held  that  Peter  and  Paul,  though  not  martyred  in 
the  same  year,  suffered  on  the  same  day.* 

We  find  that  about  the  middle  of  the  second  century  the 
custom  had  begun  of  making  a  commemoration  of  a  martyr 
dom  on  the  first  anniversary  of  its  occurrence,  and  about  the 
middle  of  the  third  century  of  making,  at  least  in  the  case  of 
very  distinguished  martyrs,  commemorations  on  successive 
anniversaries.  For  these  purposes  it  was  necessary  to  pre 
serve  the  memory  of  the  exact  day  of  the  martyrdom.  But  I 
find  no  evidence  that  either  custom  was  earlier  than  the  date 
I  have  named ;  and  I  do  not  believe  that  in  the  hurry  and 
panic  of  the  Neronian  persecutions  any  record  was  preserved 
of  the  dates  of  the  martyrdoms.  But  the  2Qth  June  does 
commemorate  a  real  occurrence,  namely,  a  translation  of 

*  Prudentius,  Peristeph.  12. 


XIX.]  THE   ACTS   OF   ST.    PETER.  377 

the  bodies  of  the  two  Apostles,  which  an  authentic  Kalendar 
of  the  Roman  Church*  records  as  having  taken  place  on  that 
day  in  the  year  258.  The  earliest  mention  of  the  commemo 
ration  of  the  two  Apostles  is  by  Caius,  of  whom  I  have  already 
spoken  (p.  51),  and  dates  from  the  beginning  of  the  third 
century.  Apparently  the  Montanist  antagonist  of  Caius,  in 
claiming  authority  for  the  Asiatic  Churches,  had  cited  the 
great  names  of  their  founders,  or  former  rulers.  Caius  (ap. 
Euseb.  ii.  25)  retorts  by  appealing  to  the  authority  of  the 
founders  of  the  Roman  Church  —  Peter  and  Paul — whose 
'trophies'  might  be  seen,  the  one  on  the  Vatican,  the*  other 
on  the  Ostian  Way,  These  were  the  places  where  early 
tradition,  which  I  see  no  reason  to  reject,  related  that  the 
Apostles  respectively  suffered.  They  were  probably  buried, 
each  near  the  place  of  his  martyrdom  ;  and  there,  in  process 
of  time,  tombs  were  erected,  which  became  centres  of  Chris 
tian  worship.  But  the  year  258  witnessed  a  terrible  perse 
cution  under  the  Emperor  Valerian,  in  the  course  of  which 
the  bishops  Sixtus  perished  at  Rome  and  Cyprian  at  Car 
thage.  The  Christians  were  forbidden  to  hold  meetings  or 
to  enter  their  places  of  sepulture.  Then  a  hiding-place  was 
found  in  the  Catacombs,  to  which,  on  2gth  June,  the  two 
bodies  were  transferred,  and  there  meetings  could  secretly 
be  held.  The  deposition  of  the  bodies  became  a  subject  of 
annual  commemoration ;  and  it  is  this,  and  not  the  martyr 
dom,  which,  as  I  believe,  the  2Qth  June  really  commemorates. 
A  document,  therefore,  which  describes  the  Apostles  as  suf 
fering  on  that  day,  is  pretty  sure  to  be  considerably  later  than 
the  year  2584 

*  See  Mommsen's  memoir  on  the  Chronographer  of  the  year  354, 
Abhandlungen  der  Konigl.  Sachs.  Gesellschaft,  i.  585. 

f  I  am  indebted  for  this  account  of  what  took  place  in  258  to  Duchesne 
{Liber  Pontificalis,  p.  civ.).  In  comparatively  modern  times  a  theory  was 
put  forward  that  Peter's  martyrdom  took  place,  not  on  the  Vatican,  but  on 
the  slope  of  the  Janiculum,  and  in  the  year  1500  a  church  (S.  Pietro  in 
Montorio)  was  built  to  consecrate  this  supposed  site.  But  Aringhi  (Roma 
Sotteranea,  II.  5)  has  given  what  appear  to  be  conclusive  reasons  for  hold 
ing  fast  to  the  old  tradition,  that  the  martyrdom  took  place  not  far  from 
the  place  on  the  Vatican  where  from  early  times  it  was  believed  Peter's 
body  was  laid.  Tradition  preserved  the  fact  that  the  Apostles'  bodies 
were  removed  from  the  original  place  of  deposition  to  the  Catacombs  ;  but 
the  true  explanation  of  the  removal  being  lost,  legend  busied  itself  in 


37^  APOCRYPHAL  ACTS   OF  THE  APOSTLES.  [XIX. 

Before  quitting  the  subject  of  the  Petrine  Acts,  I  ought 
to  mention  that  Lipsius  holds  that  the  tradition  of  Peter's 
preaching  and  martyrdom  at  Rome  is  confronted  by  a  rival 
tradition,  which  makes  the  scene  of  his  activity  Pontus  and 
the  East.  But  my  opinion  is  that  the  latter  tradition  was 
intended  not  to  contradict  but  to  supplement  the  earlier 
story,  which  told  of  Peter's  work  at  Rome.  I  have  already 
quoted  a  passage  from  Origen,  which  represents  Peter  as 
having  first  laboured  in  those  countries  which  are  named 
in  the  salutation  with  which  his  First  Epistle  begins.  The 
Gnostic  Acts  of  Andrew  appear  to  have  made  that  Apostle 
take  part  with  his  brother  in  joint  work  in  Pontus.  A  history 
is  given  of  the  successful  labours  of  Andrew  among  the  savage 
and  cannibal  tribes  which  were  believed  to  inhabit  the  shores 
of  the  Black  Sea.  The  legend  which  made  Andrew  labour  in 
that  part  of  the  world  afterwards  proved  convenient.  For 
when,  through  the  favour  of  Constantine,  Byzantium  was 
made  to  rank  above  cities  in  which  Apostles  were  known  to 
have  laboured,  an  attempt  was  made  to  supply  the  deficiency 
of  the  new  capital  in  ecclesiastical  associations  by  a  claim 
that  its  first  bishop  had  been  appointed  by  St.  Andrew,  whose 
body  it  soon  took  pains  to  possess.  No  legend  represented 
Peter  as  sharing  his  brother's  fate ;  and  we  have  every  reason 
to  think  that  the  same  Acts  which  told  of  Peter's  work  in  the 
East  told  also  of  his  return  to  other  labours  in  the  West. 

V.  The  Acts  of  St.  John*— Of  all  the  Gnostic  Acts,  those 
which  related  the  work  of  John  seem  to  me  to  have  left  the 
greatest  traces  on  Church  tradition  ;  and  I  am  inclined  to 
think  that  it  is  with  the  Acts  of  John  that  the  name  of 
Leucius  ought  specially  to  be  connected ;  for  he  seems  to 
have  been  represented  as  an  attendant  on  that  Apostle. 

inventing  another.  Pope  Gregory  the  Great  (Ep.  iv.  30)  tells  a  story  more 
obscurely  told  in  verses  of  Pope  Damasus  (De  Rossi,  Inscr.  Christ.,  ii. 
32 ;  see  also  Acta  Pet.  et  Paulz,  ap.  Tischendorf,  Acta  Apoc.  p.  38),  that 
certain  Greeks  attempted  to  steal  the  bodies,  but  were  compelled  by  a 
miraculous  thunderstorm  and  earthquake  to  drop  them  near  the  place  where 
they  were  temporarily  deposited  in  the  Catacombs.  How  long  they  re 
mained  there  is  uncertain,  but  it  is  probable  that  it  was  on  Constantine's 
accession  they  were  restored  to  their  ancient  resting-places. 

*  Some  additions  were  made  to  the  previously  edited  remains  of  these 
Acts,  in  Acta  Johannis,  published  by  Zahn,  1880. 


XIX.]  THE  ACTS   OF   ST.   JOHN.  379 

Several  traditions  concerning  John,  which  are  mentioned 
by  very  early  writers,  agree  so  closely  with  what  we  know 
to  have  been  told  in  the  Gnostic  Acts  as  to  favour  the  idea 
that  these  Acts  may  have  been  the  original  source  of  these 
traditions.  But  this  account  cannot  be  given  of  all  the 
.stories  told  about  this  Apostle.  For  instance,  the  beautiful 
story  of  John  and  the  robber,  which  I  do  not  repeat,  because 
it  has  been  told  so  often  that  most  of  you  are  likely  to  know 
it  already,  appears  to  have  been  derived  by  Clement  of  Alex 
andria  (Quis  div.  salv.  42)  from  some  different  source.  For 
later  Christian  writers,  who  show  independent  knowledge  of 
other  things  contained  in  the  Leucian  Acts,  appear  to  have 
known  for  this  story  no  other  authority  than  Clement. 

The  Leucian  Acts  came  under  discussion  at  the  second 
Council  of  Nicsea.  They  had  been  appealed  to  by  the  Icono 
clasts  ;  for  one  of  their  stories  was,  that  the  Apostle  John 
rebuked  a  disciple  for  the  cult  he  found  him  to  be  in  the 
habit  of  paying  to  a  certain  picture ;  on  which  he  was  informed 
that  the  picture  was  his  own.  John,  who  had  never  seen  his 
own  face,  refused  to  own  the  likeness,  until  a  mirror  was 
brought  him  ;  when  he  was  convinced,  but  still  said  that  his 
disciple  had  done  ill.  In  order  to  discredit  this  authority, 
passages  from  these  Acts  were  read  at  the  Council  to  exhibit 
their  heretical  character.  The  docetism  of  the  Acts  comes 
out  very  plainly  from  this  evidence.  John  is  related  as  inform 
ing  his  disciples  that  when  he  tried  to  lay  hold  on  our  Lord 
it  had  sometimes  happened  to  him  to  find  solid  substance, 
but  not  so  at  other  times ;  that,  though  he  could  see  Him 
walking,  he  was  never  able  to  see  that  He  left  any  footprint  on 
the  ground ;  and  that  when  our  Lord  was  invited  to  a  feast 
He  used  to  divide  the  loaf  that  was  given  Him  among  His 
disciples,  who  found  the  portion  thus  handed  them  so  satis 
fying,  that  they  needed  not  to  touch  the  loaves  given  by  the 
host  to  themselves.  Our  Lord  is  related  to  have  appeared  to 
His  disciples  sometimes  young,  sometimes  old  ;  sometimes 
small,  sometimes  so  high  as  to  touch  the  heavens  with  His 
head.  And  there  is  a  story  how  John,  not  bearing  to  witness 
the  Crucifixion,  fled  to  the  Mount  of  Olives  ;  and  there,  while 
4he  mob  believed  they  were  crucifying  our  Lord,  He  conversed 


380  APOCRYPHAL  ACTS   OF   THE  APOSTLES.  [XIX. 

with  John  and  showed  him  a  wonderful  vision  of  a  cross  of 
light,  which  I  must  not  attempt  to  describe,  for  I  should 
wander  away  too  far  if  I  were  to  try  to  explain  how  some 
leading  Gnostic  sects  contrived,  notwithstanding  their  doce- 
tism,  to  rival  the  orthodox  in  the  honour  they  paid  to  the 
Cross. 

Now,  one  of  the  reasons  for  thinking  it  possible  that  these 
Acts  may  be  as  old  as  Clement  of  Alexandria  is,  that  that 
father  states  that  he  read  *  in  the  traditions,'  that  when  John 
handled  the  body  of  our  Lord  it  offered  no  resistance,  but 
yielded  place  to  the  Apostle's  hand. 

The  Encratite  character  of  these  Acts  is  very  strongly 
marked.  For  example,  one  of  the  Apostle's  miracles  is 
performed  on  a  lady  who  had  submitted  to  die  rather  than 
associate  with  her  husband.  And  we  have  also  the  favourite 
Gnostic  type  of  miracle,  the  conferring  intelligence  on  the 
brute  creation.  It  may  amuse  you  to  hear,  by  way  of  example, 
what  the  narrator  describes  as  a  pleasant  incident.  On  their 
journey  the  party  stopped  at  an  uninhabited  caravanserai. 
They  found  there  but  one  bare  couch,  and  having  laid  clothes 
on  it  they  made  the  Apostle  lie  on  it,  while  the  rest  of  the 
party  laid  themselves  down  to  sleep  on  the  floor.  But  John- 
was  troubled  by  a  great  multitude  of  bugs,  until  after  having 
tossed  sleepless  for  half  the  night  he  said  to  them,  in  the 
hearing  of  all:  'I  say  unto  you,  O  ye  bugs,  be  ye  kindly 
considerate  ;  leave  your  home  for  this  night,  and  go  to  rest 
in  a  place  which  is  far  from  the  servants  of  God.'  At  this  the 
disciples  laughed,  while  the  Apostle  turned  to  sleep,  and  they 
conversed  gently,  so  as  not  to  disturb  him.  In  the  morning 
the  first  to  awake  went  to  the  door,  and  there  they  saw  a 
great  multitude  of  bugs  standing.  The  rest  collected  to  view, 
and  at  last  St.  John  awoke  and  saw  likewise.  Then  (mindful 
rather  of  his  grateful  obligation  to  the  bugs  than  of  the 
comfort  of  the  next  succeeding  traveller)  he  said  :  '  Oye  bugs,, 
since  ye  have  been  kind  and  have  observed  my  charge,  return 
to  your  place.'  No  sooner  had  he  said  this  and  risen  from 
the  couch,  than  the  bugs  all  in  a  run  (Spo/xatot)  rushed  from 
the  door  to  the  couch,  climbed  up  the  legs,  and  disappeared 
into  the  joinings.  And  John  said:  'See  how  these  creatures,, 


XIX.]  THE  ACTS   OF  ST.   JOHN.  381 

having  heard  the  voice  of  a  man,  have  obeyed  ;  but  we, 
hearing  the  voice  of  God,  neglect  and  disobey;  and  how 
long  ?'  (Zahn,  p.  226.) 

I  will  now  mention  some  of  the  statements  which  were 
contained  in  the  Leucian  Acts,  and  which  were  known  in  the 
Church  so  early  that,  if  we  could  believe  it  was  from  these 
Acts  the  knowledge  was  obtained,  we  might  assign  them 
very  high  antiquity: — 

(1)  These  Acts  tell  (Zahn,  p.  247)  how  John's  virginity  had 
been   preserved   by   a   threefold  interposition  of  our  Lord, 
breaking   off  the  Apostle's    designs  each  time  that  he  at 
tempted   to   marry.      In    conformity  with  their  Encratism, 
these  Acts  dwelt  much  on  the  Apostle's  virginity,  describing 
this  as  the  cause  of  our  Lord's  love  to  him,  and  as  the  reason 
for  his  many  privileges  ;  in  particular,  as  the  reason  why  to  a 
virgin  the  care  of  the  Virgin  Mother  was  committed.     In  a 
third-century  Gnostic  work,  Pisiis  Sophia,  the  name  of  the 
Apostle  John  ordinarily  has  the  title  6  TrapOevos  appended. 
Now    the    opinion    of  John's    virginity,   concerning   which 
the  canonical  Scriptures  say  nothing,  is  common  to  many 
of  the  fathers.      It  is  as  early  as  Tertullian  (Zte  Monog.  17). 
We    are   not   entitled    to   say  positively  that    this    opinion 
must  have  been  derived  from  the  Acts  of  which  I  am  speak 
ing,  because  a  true  tradition  that  John  never  married  might 
easily  have  been  preserved  in  the  Churches  of  Asia  Minor ; 
yet,  when  this  is  taken  in  connexion  with  other  coincidences, 
it  gives  some  probability  to  the  view  that  Acts  of  John  existed 
as  early  as  the  second  century,  and  were  the  source  whence 
subsequent  writers  drew  their  traditions. 

(2)  The  story  told  in  the  Muratorian  Fragment  (see  p.  54) 
of  John's  composition  of  his  Gospel  having  originated  from  a 
request  of  the  bishops  of  Asia  has  great  affinity  with  what 
Clement  of  Alexandria  tells  (Euseb.  vi.  14),  that  John,  having 
seen  that  the  bodily  things  had  been  related  in  the  previous 
Gospels,  made  a  Spiritual  Gospel  TrporpaTrevra  VTTO  rwv  yvcopi)u,aH', 
IIvcv/xaTt  Oeo^opyOtvTa.    It  is  not  conceivable  that  one  of  these 
writers  copied  from  the  other ;  but  several  later  writers  (as, 
for  instance,  Jerome  in  the  preface  to  his  Commentary  on 
St.  Matthew)  tell  the  same  story,  agreeing,  however,  in  some 


382  APOCRYPHAL  ACTS   OF  THE  APOSTLES.  [XIX. 

additional  particulars,  which  show  that  they  did  not  derive 
their  knowledge  from  either  of  the  authors  whom  I  have 
named.  Thus  they  tell  that  the  request  that  John  should 
write  was  caused  by  the  inroads  of  the  Ebionite  heresy, 
which  made  it  necessary  that  the  Apostle  should  add  some 
thing  concerning  the  Divinity  of  our  Lord  to  what  his 
predecessors  had  said  about  His  humanity;  and  they  tell 
how,  in  answer  to  their  prayers,  the  Apostle,  filled  with  the 
Holy  Ghost,  burst  into  the  prologue,  '  In  the  beginning 
was  the  Word'  (see  note,  p.  54).  Other  coincidences  make 
it  likely  that  this  story  was  found  in  Acts  of  John  used  by 
Clement. 

(3)  Tertullian  (Prascrip.  36)  refers  to  the  story  of  John 
having  been  cast  into  burning  oil,  and  taken  out  unhurt. 
Jerome,  who  tells  the  same  story  in  his  Commentary  on 
Matthew,  xx.  23,  there  speaks  of  the  Apostle  as  an  athlete, 
the  peculiar  applicability  of  which  term  is  not  obvious,  but 
receives  its  explanation  from  Acts  which  are  known  to  have 
been  derived  from  those  of  Leucius,  where  John  is  said  to 
have  come  out  of  the  oil,  *  not  burned,  but  anointed  like  an 
athlete.'  Hence  it  is  concluded  that  Jerome,  who  is  other 
wise  known  to  have  used  the  Leucian  Acts,  found  in  them  this 
story  ;  and  then  arises  the  question  whether  these  Acts  may 
not  have  been  early  enough  for  Tertullian  to  have  used  them 
too.  On  the  other  hand,  it  must  be  mentioned  that  Origen, 
when  commenting  on  our  Lord's  words  to  the  sons  of  Zebedee, 
and  reconciling  them  with  the  fact  that  John  did  not  suffer 
martyrdom,  makes  no  mention  of  the  story  of  the  baptism  in 
oil.  A  later  story  makes  John  miraculously  drink  a  cup  of 
poison  with  impunity.* 

On  the  whole,  we  have  clear  evidence  that  Acts  or  tra 
ditions  about  John  were  in  circulation  before  the  time  of 
Clement  and  Tertullian.  When  we  combine  the  docetic 
character  of  the  traditions  which  reached  Clement  with  the 
fact  that  the  Acts  of  Thecla,  a  work  known  to  Tertullian,  had 

*  This  miracle  is  very  rare  in  ancient  hagiology.  The  only  other  case  I 
remember  is  that  Papias  tells  that  Justus  Barsabas  drank  poison,  and, 
through  the  Lord's  grace,  received  no  hurt  (see  p.  318).  I  cannot  but  think 
that  Papias  told  the  story  in  illustration  of  Mark  xvi.  18. 


XIX.]  THE   ACTS   OF   ST.   JOHN.  383 

clearly  an  Encratite  stamp,  it  seems  to  me  highly  probable 
that  these  second  century  Acts  of  John  had  the  same  charac 
ter,  and  that  they  were  either  those  afterwards  known  under 
the  name  of  Leucius,  or,  at  least,  that  they  contained  the 
materials  on  which  the  Leucian  writer  worked.* 

It  would  be  wearisome  if  I  were  to  discuss  all  the  legends 
about  John.  It  will  be  enough  if  I  mention  that  Leucius 
concludes  by  relating  the  Apostle's  painless  death.  He  gives 
what  purports  to  be  John's  sermon  and  Eucharistic  prayer  on 
the  last  Sunday  of  his  life.  Then,  after  breaking  of  bread — 
there  is  no  mention  of  wine — he  commands  Byrrhus  (the 
name  occurs  in  the  Ignatian  epistles  as  that  of  an  Ephesian 
deacon)  to  follow  him  with  two  companions,  bringing  spades 
with  them.  They  go  to  a  friend's  burying-place  outside  the 
city,  and  there  dig  a  grave,  in  which  the  Apostle  lays  himself 
down,  and  with  joyful  prayer  blesses  his  disciples,  and  resigns 
his  soul  to  God.f  Later  versions  improve  the  miraculous 
character  of  the  story :  in  particular  that  of  which  Augus  • 
tine  makes  mention  (In  Johann.  xxi.,  Tractat.  124);  that  the 
Apostle  lay  in  the  grave  not  dead  but  sleeping,  as  might  be 
seen  by  the  motions  of  the  dust  over  his  grave,  which  played 
as  if  stirred  by  the  Apostle's  breathing.^  Zahn  has  con- 


*  Zahn  dates  the  Leucian  Acts  of  John  as  early  as  130 ;  Lipsius  places 
them  about  160  ;  I  am  myself  inclined  to  date  them  10  or  20  years  later. 

f  This  story  is  accepted  as  true  by  Epiphanius  (Hcer.  Ixxix.  5) . 

J  The  form  in  which  the  Gnostic  stories  about  John  were  circulated 
among  the  orthodox  is  illustrated  by  a  very  ancient  prologue  to  St.  John's 
Gospel,  found,  with  slight  variations,  in  many  MSS.,  in  particular  the  Codex 
Aureus  and  the  Codex  Amiatinus.  It  runs  as  follows : — Johannes  Evan- 
gelista  unus  ex  discipulis  domini,  qui  virgo  electus  a  domino  est,  quern  de 
nuptiis  volentem  nubere  revocavit  dominus,  cujus  virginitatis  in  hoc  duplex 
testimonium  in  Evangelic  datur,  quod  et  prse  ceteris  dilectus  domini  dicitur, 
et  huic  matrem  suam  de  cruce  commendavit  ut  virginem  virgo  servaret. 
Denique  manifestans  in  evangelic  quod  erat  ipse  incorruptibilis,  [incorrup- 
tibilis]  verbi  opus  inchoans  solus,  verbum  carnem  factum  esse,  nee  lumen  a 
tenebris  fuisse  comprehensum  testatur,  primus  signum  ponens  quod  in 
nuptiis  fecit  dominus,  ut  ostendens  quod  erat  ipse  legentibus  demonstaret, 
quod  ubi  dominus  invitatur,  deficere  nuptiarum  vinum  debeat,  ut  veteribus 
immutatis  nova  omnia  qua?  a  Christo  instituuntur  appareant.  Hie  evangelium 
scripsit  in  Asia  postea  quam  in  Pathmos  insula  apocalypsin  scripserat,  ut 
cui  in  principio  canonis  incorruptibile  principium  in  genesi  et  incorruptibilis 
finis  per  virginem  in  apocalypsi  redderetur,  dicente  Christo,  ego  sum  A  et 
n.  Et  hie  est  Johannes,  qui  sciens  supervenisse  diem  recessus  sui  convo- 
catis  discipulis  suis  in  Epheso  per  multa  signorum  experimenta  promens 


384  APOCRYPHAL   ACTS   OF   THE   APOSTLES.  [XIX. 

jectured  that  the  story  of  two  tombs  of  John  at  Ephesus  may 
have  arisen  from  the  traditional  veneration  paid  to  two  spots 
sacred  to  the  memory  of  John  :  one  the  place  within  the  city 
where  he  had  been  wont  to  preach  ;  the  other  the  place 
outside  the  city  where  he  was  buried. 

But  I  must  not  conclude  this  account  of  legends  of  the 
Apostolic  age  without  saying  something  about  one  of  them, 
which,  though  one  of  the  latest  in  birth,  has  been  the  most 
fortunate  in  its  reception — I  mean  the  story  of  the  Assump 
tion  of  the  Blessed  Virgin.  It  is,  as  you  know,  received  as 
true  in  the  Roman  Catholic  section  of  the  Church.  Some 
indeed  have  held  (see  Tillemont,  i.  476)  that  the  word  means 
no  more  than  the  name  Koi/xTycrts,  under  which  the  same  feast 
is  kept  in  the  Greek  Church ;  and  the  prayers  appointed  for 
the  feast  in  the  Roman  Church  make  no  distinct  mention  of 
a  corporal  assumption.  But  this  is  certainly  in  that  Church 
a  matter  almost  universally  believed.  And  before  the  meet 
ing  of  the  Vatican  Council,  those  entitled  to  speak  with 
authority  declared  that  at  that  Council  the  wish  of  Pius  IX. 
would  be  carried  out,  and  the  fact  of  the  Assumption  erected 
into  an  article  of  faith,  to  deny  which  would  forfeit  salvation. 
The  dispersion  of  the  Council  disappointed  these  anticipations, 
at  least  for  the  time.  It  were  much  to  be  desired  that  the 
story,  if  true,  should  receive  some  such  infallible  attestation, 
because  on  the  ordinary  grounds  of  historical  evidence  its 
pretensions  are  of  the  slenderest.  Not  that  it  had  not  wide 
extent  of  circulation,  for  it  is  handed  down  in  Greek,  Latin, 
Syriac,*  Arabic,  Ethiopic,  and  Sahidic.  But  none  of  the 
existing  forms  is  earlier  than  the  end  of  the  fourth,  or 
beginning  of  the  fifth  century ;  and  the  absence  of  any  early 

Christum,  descendensin  defossum  sepulturae  suae  locum  facta  oratione  positus 
est  ad  patres  suos,  tarn  extraneus  a  dolore  mortis  quam  a  corruptione  carnis 
invenitur  alienus.  Tamen  post  omnes  evangelium  scripsit  et  hoc  virgini 
debebatur.  Quorum  tamen  vel  scripturarum  tempore  dispositio  vel 
librorum  ordinatio  ideo  per  singula  a  nobis  non  exponitur,  ut  sciendi 
desiderio  collocato  et  quserentibus  fructus  laboris  et  domino  magisterii 
doctrina  servetur. 

*  The  Greek  and  Latin  versions  are  included  in  Tischendorf  's  Apocalypses 
apocrypha  ;  and  Syriac  versions  have  been  published  by  Wright,  Contri 
butions  to  the  Apocryphal  Literature,  N.  T.,  and  Journal  of  Sacred 
Literature,  1865. 


XIX.]  THE  ASSUMPTION  OF  THE  BLESSED  VIRGIN.  385 

authoritative  version  of  the  story  is  evidenced  by  the  great 
variety  with  which  it  is  told,  which  is  such  as  to  embarrass 
me  a  little  in  what  form  I  shall  present  it  to  you.  According 
to  the  oldest  authorities,  the  time  is  the  second  year  after  the 
Ascension,  though  later  authorities  give  the  Virgin  a  score 
more  years  of  life.  The  Virgin  prays  the  Lord  for  her  release, 
and  for  the  protection  of  her  body  and  soul  from  earthly  and 
spiritual  enemies.  Then  the  angel  Gabriel  is  sent  to  her  to 
announce  her  departure  in  three  days,  and  gives  her  a  palm- 
branch  as  a  token.  At  her  request  the  Apostles  are  all 
brought  to  Bethlehem  to  witness  her  departure,  each  being 
miraculously  wafted  on  clouds  from  the  quarter  of  the  world 
whither  he  had  gone — John  from  Ephesus,  Peter  from  Rome, 
Thomas  from  India,  &c.  Three  or  four  of  the  Apostles  who 
had  already  died  are  raised  to  life  and  brought  like  the  rest ; 
the  angel  who  summons  them  warning  them  that  they  are 
not  to  suppose  the  general  resurrection  has  yet  come,  as  they 
are  only  brought  to  life  in  order  to  take  part  in  the  obsequies 
of  the  Virgin.  By  the  fifth  century  the  belief  was  entertained 
in  Ephesus  that  the  mother  of  our  Lord  had  accompanied  St. 
John  to  Ephesus ;  but  the  earlier  story  makes  her  die  at 
Jerusalem.  For  the  Jews  having  made  an  attack  on  the  house 
at  Bethlehem,  which  had  become  notorious  by  the  multitude 
of  the  miracles  wrought  there,  the  Apostles  smite  the  assail 
ants  with  blindness,  and  transport  the  couch  to  Jerusalem. 
Then  on  the  third  day  the  Lord  descends  from  heaven  with 
His  angels,  and  takes  to  Himself  the  Virgin's  soul.  But  the 
Jews  are  resolved  to  burn  her  body  with  fire ;  and  this  they 
would  do,  but  that  they  are  smitten  with  blindness  ;  and  so 
wander  fruitlessly,  while  the  Apostles  bear  her  body  to  the 
Valley  of  Jehoshaphat,  to  bury  her  in  a  new  tomb  prepared 
by  Joseph  of  Arimathea.  Peter  on  the  right  hand  bears  the 
bier ;  but  the  honour  of  carrying  the  palm-branch  before  her 
is  yielded  to  the  virgin  John.  One  of  the  chiefs  of  the  Jews 
having  laid  hold  of  the  bier,  an  angel  with  a  fiery  sword  cuts 
off  his  hands  ;  but,  on  his  repentance  and  conversion,  the 
hands  are,  by  the  Apostles'  intercession,  joined  on  to  his 
body  again.  Then,  according  to  one  account,  the  angels  are 
heard  for  two  days  singing  at  the  tomb ;  but  on  the  third  day 

2  C 


386  APOCRYPHAL  ACTS   OF   THE  APOSTLES.  [XIX. 

the  songs  cease,  and  so  the  Apostles  know  that  the  body  has 
been  transferred  to  Paradise.  According  to  another  account, 
Thomas  had  not  been  with  the  Apostles  when  they  took  leave 
of  the  Virgin;  but  he  sees  her  body  being  taken  up  to  heaven, 
and  at  his  prayer  she  drops  him  her  girdle  as  a  token.  When 
he  afterwards  joins  the  other  Apostles,  and  declares  that  she 
is  not  in  the  tomb,  they  suppose  that  it  is  only  his  habitual 
incredulity  which  makes  him  doubt  their  word  that  they  had 
placed  her  there  ;  but  he  shows  the  girdle,  and  on  opening 
the  tomb  they  find  the  body  is  not  there. 

The  Greek  version  of  this  story,  published  by  Tischendorf, 
in  which  the  story  purports  to  be  told  by  the  Apostle  John, 
has  all  the  marks  of  lateness,  and  is  clearly  not  earlier  than 
the  fifth  century.  The  Latin  version  bears  a  somewhat  earlier 
aspect.  Melito  of  Sardis,  who,  with  some  little  disregard  of 
chronology,  is  made  a  disciple  of  the  Apostle  John,  is  the 
narrator;  and  a  preface  states  that  his  object  is  to  give  an 
authentic  account  of  what  Leucius  had  related  with  heretical 
additions.  This  suggests  that  the  existing  versions  may 
possibly  be  an  orthodox  recasting  of  an  earlier  Gnostic  story; 
and  Lipsius  holds  that  this  is  the  case,  but  as  it  seems  to  me 
on  no  sufficient  grounds,  for  I  can  find  no  evidence  that  the 
story  had  currency,  even  in  heretical  circles,  so  early  as  the 
third  century. 

I  have  detained  you  a  long  time  in  the  region  of  the 
fabulous,  but  the  time  is  not  altogether  wasted  that  is  spent 
on  a  study  which  gives  one  a  keener  sense  of  the  difference 
between  the  legendary  and  the  historical ;  and  I  never  feel 
so  strongly  that  the  book  of  the  Acts  of  the  Apostles  is  a 
record  of  real  history,  as  when  I  take  it  up  after  having  laid 
down  the  not  very  cunningly  devised  fables  in  which  men 
have  exhibited  the  sort  of  Apostolic  Acts  pure  invention 
would  furnish  us  with. 


xx. 

THE    PAULINE    EPISTLES. 


T  T  is  a  satisfaction  to  me  to  escape  from  the  quaking  sands 
•*•  of  apocryphal  legends,  and  step  on  the  firm  ground  of 
the  Pauline  Epistles.  Of  these  there  are  four  which,  as  you 
know,  Baur  does  not  question  ;  and  later  critics,  who  have 
no  bigoted  attachment  to  received  opinion,  find  themselves 
obliged  to  make  further  acknowledgments.  Hilgenfeld  and 
Davidson  agree  in  owning  i  Thessalonians,  Philemon,  and 
Philippians :  Renan  positively  rejects  none  but  the  Pastoral 
Epistles,  but  has  doubts  besides  concerning  the  Epistle  to 
the  Ephesians.  But  Baur  is  far  from  marking  the  lowest 
point  of  negative  criticism.  He  found  disciples  who  bettered 
his  instruction,  until  it  became  as  hard  for  a  young  Professor, 
anxious  to  gain  a  reputation  for  ingenuity,  to  make  a  new 
assault  on  a  New  Testament  book,  as  it  is  now  for  an  Alpine 
club  man  to  find  in  Switzerland  a  virgin  peak  to  climb.  The 
consequence  has  been  that  in  Holland,  Scholten  and  others, 
who  had  been  counted  as  leaders  in  the  school  of  destructive 
criticism,  have  been  obliged  to  come  out  in  the  character  of 
Conservatives,  striving  to  prove,  in  opposition  to  Loman, 
that  there  really  did  live  such  a  person  as  Jesus  of  Nazareth, 
and  that  it  is  not  true  that  every  one  of  the  Epistles  ascribed 
to  Paul  is  a  forgery.  And  certainly  it  is  not  only  to  the 
orthodox  that  the  doctrine  that  we  have  no  genuine  remains 
of  Paul  is  inconvenient ;  it  must  also  embarrass  those  who 
look  for  arguments  to  prove  an  Epistle  to  be  un-Pauline.  I 
leave  these  last  to  fight  the  battle  with  their  more  advanced 
brethren.  I  have  constantly  felt  some  hesitation  in  deciding 

2  c  2 


388  THE    PAULINE    EPISTLES.  [XX. 

what  objections  it  was  worth  while  to  report  to  you.  On  the 
one  hand,  it  is  waste  of  energy  to  try  to  kill  what,  if  let  alone, 
will  be  sure  to  die  of  itself:  on  the  other  hand,  there  is  the 
danger  that  you  might  afterwards  find  notions,  which  I  had 
passed  by  as  too  contemptible  for  refutation,  circulating 
among  half-learned  people  as  the  '  latest  results '  which 
4  eminent  critics '  had  arrived  at  in  Germany.  But  in  the 
present  case,  I  think  I  am  safe  in  deciding  that  it  is 
practically  unnecessary  for  me  to  trouble  myself  about  the 
opinions  of  those  who  carry  their  scepticism  to  a  further 
point  than  Baur. 

Let  me  say  this,  however,  that  I  think  young  critics  have 
been  seduced  into  false  tracks  by  the  reputation  which  has 
been  wrongly  gained  by  the  display  of  ingenuity  in  finding 
some  new  reason  for  doubting  received  opinions.  A  man  is 
just  as  bad  a  critic  who  rejects  what  is  genuine,  as  who 
accepts  what  is  spurious.  '  Be  ye  good  money-changers '  is 
a  maxim  which  I  have  already  told  you  (p.  18)  was  early 
applied  to  this  subject.  But  if  a  bank  clerk  would  be  unfit 
for  his  work  who  allowed  himself  easily  to  be  imposed  on  by 
forged  paper,  he  would  be  equally  useless  to  his  employers 
if  he  habitually  pronounced  every  note  that  was  tendered 
him  to  be  a  forgery,  every  sovereign  to  be  base  metal.  I 
quite  disbelieve  that  the  early  Christian  Church  was  so  taken 
possession  of  by  forgers  that  almost  all  its  genuine  remains 
were  corrupted  or  lost,  while  the  spurious  formed  the  great 
bulk  of  what  was  thought  worth  preserving.  The  suspicions 
that  have  been  expressed  seem  to  me  to  pass  the  bounds  of 
literary  sanity.  There  are  rogues  in  this  world,  and  you  do 
well  to  guard  against  them ;  but  if  you  allow  your  mind  to  be 
poisoned  by  suspicion,  and  take  every  man  for  a  rogue,  why, 
the  rogues  will  conspire  against  you,  and  lock  you  up  in  a 
lunatic  asylum. 

In  this  lecture  I  must  confine  myself  to  discussing  the 
genuineness  of  Epistles,  and  I  am  glad  that  I  can  assume 
your  acquaintance  with  Paley's  admirable  Hora  Paulines. 
How  very  wide  a  field  the  general  subject  of  the  life  and  work 
of  Paul  would  present,  if  I  attempted  to  enter  it,  is  evidenced 
by  the  mass  of  literature  which  of  late  years  has  been 


XX.]  THE    PAULINE    EPISTLES.  389 

occupied  with  it.  A  beginning  was  made  by  Conybeare 
and  Howson's  St.  Paul ;  since  then  we  have  had  works  on 
St.  Paul  by  Mr.  Lewin  and  by  Archdeacon  Farrar,  each  in 
two  large  volumes.  Renan,  approaching  the  subject  from 
another  point  of  view,  expressly  devotes  one  volume  to  St. 
Paul,  and  finds  himself  obliged  to  give  also  to  that  Apostle's 
work  a  considerable  portion  both  of  the  previous  and  of  the 
subsequent  volumes  of  his  history.  Then  there  are  very 
interesting  small  volumes  published  by  the  Christian  Know 
ledge  Society  on  separate  parts  of  the  Apostle's  labours — 'St. 
Paul  in  Greece,'  '  St.  Paul  in  Asia/  &c.  Much  additional 
information  is  to  be  found  in  the  Introductions  to  the 
Epistles  in  the  Speakers  Commentary,  and  in  Bishop  Ellicott's. 
But  chief  among  recent  aids  to  knowledge  of  St.  Paul  may 
be  reckoned  Bishop  Lightfoot's  three  volumes  of  Com 
mentaries — a  work,  the  discontinuance  of  which  we  have 
seen  with  regret,  perhaps  not  quite  selfish.  For  it  may  be 
doubted  whether  the  gain  which  the  present  generation  in 
England  receives  from  his  episcopal  labours  compensates  the 
loss  which  the  Church  at  large  has  suffered  in  the  inter 
ruption  of  the  production  of  work  which  would  have  been 
of  permanent  value.  Postponing  the  consideration  of  the 
Epistle  to  the  Hebrews,  I  deal  now  with  the  letters 
which  bear  Paul's  name.  These  divide  themselves  into 
four  groups,  separated  by  intervals  of  time  of  somewhere 
about  five  years:  (i)  the  two  Epistles  to  the  Thessalo- 
nians,  (2)  the  four  acknowledged  by  Baur,  (3)  the  Epistles 
written  during  the  Roman  imprisonment,  (4)  the  Pastoral 
Epistles. 

With  regard  to  the  Pauline  Epistles  generally,  it  may  be 
remarked  that  the  very  early  and  general  recognition  which 
they  obtained  throws  fatal  obstacles  in  the  way  of  the  theory 
that  the  party  which  rejected  Paul's  apostleship  had  any  very 
long  or  wide  possession  of  the  Church.  It  is  with  reserve 
that  I  can  appeal  to  Peter's  Second  Epistle  in  proof  of  the 
authority  of  the  Pauline  letters,  because  the  genuineness  of 
that  Epistle  is  denied ;  but,  whether  written  by  Peter  or  not, 
it  is  unquestionably  an  early  document ;  and  it  is  clear  that 
at  the  time  of  its  composition,  a  collection  of  Pauline  letters 


39°  THE   PAULINE   EPISTLES.  [XX. 

had  been  made  and  was  regarded  as  of  high  authority.* 
There  is  abundant  other  evidence  at  what  a  very  early  period 
the  Pauline  letters  passed  from  being  the  special  property  of 
the  Churches  to  which  they  were  severally  addressed,  and 
were  formed  into  a  collection  for  the  use  of  the  Church  at 
large.  This  was  unquestionably  the  case  at  the  end  of  the 
second  century,  when  first  Christian  literature  becomes 
abundant ;  for  we  find  Irenseus,  Clement,  and  Tertullian,  not 
only  owning  the  authority  of  the  thirteen  Pauline  Epistles, 
but  apparently  unconscious  that  there  could  be  two  opinions 
on  the  subject.  We  have  in  the  Muratorian  Canon  (see 
p.  49)  the  order  in  which  the  Epistles  stood  towards  the  end 
of  the  second  century  in  the  collection  in  use  in  the  Church 
of  Rome.  Going  back  to  the  first  half  of  the  second  century 
we  find  that  Marcion  used  a  collection  of  ten  Pauline  letters, 
which  formed  his  Apostolicon,  these  being  the  same  as  the 
thirteen  recognized  in  the  Western  Church,  with  the  excep 
tion  of  the  three  Pastoral  Epistles.  Marcion  is  notorious  for 
his  exaggerated  Paulinism ;  but  though  more  than  one  answer 
to  him  is  extant,  there  is  no  indication  that  any  of  his  orthodox 
opponents  met  him  by  questioning  that  Apostle's  authority, 
reverence  for  which  was  common  to  both  parties.  But  we  may 
be  sure  that  the  orthodox  did  not  learn  that  reverence  from 
Marcion,  and  that  it  was  not  his  example  which  set  the  Catholic 
Church  on  forming  a  collection  of  Pauline  letters.  We  are, 
therefore,  safe  in  inferring  that  such  a  collection  must  have 
been  formed  before  Marcion's  time.  It  is  now  universally 
acknowledged  that  the  Church's  Gospel  was  not  formed  by 
enlargement  of  Marcion's  Gospel,  but,  on  the  contrary, 
Marcion's  by  mutilation  of  the  Church's  Gospel ;  so  we  may 
reasonably  conclude  that  the  Church's  collection  of  thirteen 
letters  is  more  ancient  than  Marcion's  collection  of  only  ten. 
It  is  natural  to  think  that  it  was  the  existence  of  a  collec 
tion  of  Pauline  letters  which  set  the  example  of  making  other 


*  It  is  by  no  means  clear  to  what  particular  passage  in  Paul's  letters  re 
ference  is  made  in  2  Pet.  iii.  15  ;  but  I  cannot  agree  with  Zahn,  to  whom  in 
this  section  I  am  much  indebted  (N.  T.  Canon,  pp.  811-839),  in  the  im 
probable  explanation  that  the  collection  of  Pauline  letters,  known  to  2  Peter, 
included  one  not  embraced  in  the  collection  which  has  come  down  to  us. 


XX.]  THE   PAULINE   EPISTLES.  391 

collections  of  Christian  letters.  Thus  we  learn  from  Euseb. 
iv.  23,  not  only  that  there  was  extant  a  collection  of  the  let 
ters  of  Dionysius  of  Corinth,  including  even  some  addressed 
to  individuals,  but  further,  that  in  the  lifetime  of  Dionysius 
himself,  his  letters  had  thus  passed  into  general  circulation ; 
for  he  complains  of  corruptions  made  in  the  text  of  his  letters 
by  emissaries  of  the  devil.  It  is  more  important  to  remark 
that  Polycarp's  epistle  reveals  that  before  tidings  of  the  mar 
tyrdom  of  Ignatius  had  yet  reached  the  East,  a  collection  of 
Ignatius' s  letters  had  already  begun  to  be  formed,  one  Church 
writing  to  another  to  request  copies  of  the  letters  in  its  pos 
session.  The  probable  inference  that  the  Churches  which 
set  about  making  a  collection  of  Ignatian  letters  were  already 
in  possession  of  Pauline  letters,  is  put  beyond  doubt  by  the 
contents  of  Polycarp's  epistle.  It  is  not  merely  that  Polycarp 
is  evidently  in  possession  of  a  large  collection  of  Pauline  letters 
— for  he  makes  undoubted  use  of  the  Epistle  to  the  Romans,  of 
both  to  the  Corinthians,  of  Galatians,  Ephesians,  Philippians, 
both  Thessalonians,  and  both  to  Timothy — but  he  assumes 
also  acquaintance  on  the  part  of  his  readers  with  the  Pauline 
letters  ;  not  only  his  letters  to  their  own  Church,  of  which  he 
makes  express  mention,  but  also  those  to  the  Corinthians  and 
the  Thessalonians.  New  Testament  quotations  are  much 
more  rare  in  the  epistles  of  Ignatius  than  in  that  of  Polycarp; 
but  there  is  express  mention  of  the  Pauline  letters,  and 
besides  a  very  large  number  of  coincidences  of  expressions 
with  these  letters,  a  few  unmistakeable  quotations,  in  par 
ticular  from  the  Epistles  to  the  Corinthians  and  Ephesians. 
Remembering,  then,  that  Ignatius  died  in  the  reign  of  Trajan, 
and  that  Polycarp  quotes  the  Epistles  to  Timothy,  we  are 
justified  in  inferring  that  the  collection  of  thirteen  Pauline 
letters  was  in  general  Church  use  before  A.D.  113.  Going 
back,  then,  to  the  Epistle  of  Clement  of  Rome  to  the  Corin 
thians,  we  know  for  certain  that  at  least  one  letter,  addressed 
to  a  different  Church,  had  found  its  way  to  Rome,  namely, 
that  to  the  Corinthians  themselves,  to  which  an  express 
appeal  is  made.  Finding  thus  that,  at  the  date  of  Clement's 
letter,  Pauline  letters  had  passed  out  of  the  keeping  of  the 
particular  Church  to  which  they  were  addressed,  we  are 


39*  THE    PAULINE    EPISTLES.  [XX. 

justified  in  inferring,  from  several  coincidences  of  language, 
Clement's  acquaintance  with  other  Pauline  letters;  and  it  is  to 
be  noted  that  those  coincidences  are  most  distinct  in  the  case 
of  one  of  the  most  questioned  of  Paul's  epistles — that  to  the 
Ephesians,  and  quite  sufficiently  distinct  in  the  case  of  others 
— those  to  Timothy.  Since  we  know,  then,  for  certain,  that 
in  the  year  95  the  letter  to  their  own  Church  was  not  the  only 
Pauline  letter  in  the  possession  of  the  Church  of  Rome,  it 
becomes  highly  probable  that  they  had  in  use  the  whole  col 
lection  of  thirteen  letters  which  we  find  in  general  use  less 
than  twenty  years  later,  and  many  traces  of  the  use  of  which 
are  to  be  found  in  Clement's  letter.  If  we  ask,  then,  at  what 
period  the  collection  was  made,  nothing  seems  to  me  more 
probable  than  that  it  was  when  the  news  of  Paul's  death  be 
came  public  that  different  Churches  set  themselves  to  collect 
and  compare  the  letters  of  his  which  they  possessed.  And 
though  Zahn's  reasons  come  much  short  of  demonstration, 
his  conjecture  is  probable  enough,  that  the  collection  was 
first  made  at  Corinth,  the  epistles  to  which  Church  occupy 
the  first  place  in  the  Muratorian  list. 

Returning  now  to  what  has  been  said  (p.  347),  we  see  what 
an  early  date  St.  Luke's  non-acquaintance  with  Pauline  letters 
obliges  us  to  put  on  the  book  of  the  Acts.  But  it  is  the  less 
necessary  to  insist  on  this  point,  since  both  Clement  and 
Polycarp,  whose  testimony  we  have  used  to  the  existence  of 
a  collection  of  Pauline  letters,  likewise  make  distinct  use  of 
the  Acts. 

It  is  quite  unnecessary  to  produce  other  second-century 
testimony  to  the  authority  of  the  Pauline  letters ;  and 
if,  therefore,  I  think  it  worth  while  to  give  a  proof  of 
the  reverence  in  which  Paul's  authority  was  held  in  the 
time  of  Justin  Martyr,  it  is  not  that  there  is  any  real  ne 
cessity  for  showing  that  that  father  was  no  dissentient 
from  the  general  opinion  of  the  Church,  but  because  the 
piece  of  evidence  seems  to  me  interesting  in  itself,  and 
has  only  recently  been  brought  clearly  to  light.*  Only  two 

*  I  am  indebted  for  my  knowledge  of  it  to  a  paper  by  Zahn  (Zeitschrift 
f.  Kirchengeschichte,  viii.  I.,  Dec.  1885). 


XX.]  METHODIUS.  393 

works  of  Justin  have  come  down  to  us  with  tolerable  com 
pleteness,  and  are  universally  recognized  as  genuine,  the 
Apology  and  the  Dialogue  with  Trypho.  The  subject  of  the 
one  being  the  controversy  with  heathenism,  and  the  other 
that  with  Judaism,  both  works  were  intended  to  influence 
readers  external  to  the  Church ;  and,  accordingly,  although 
in  countless  passages  Justin's  use  of  the  New  Testament 
writings  is  evident  to  one  already  acquainted  with  them,  he 
never  formally  quotes  any  of  them  except  (as  already  men 
tioned,  p.  224)  in  one  case,  the  Apocalypse.  These  two 
works,  however,  offer  abundant  evidence  of  Justin's  acquaint 
ance  with  the  writings  of  St.  Paul,  whose  ideas,  and  even 
whose  language,  he  repeatedly  reproduces.  Proofs  will  be 
found  in  Westcott's  N.  T.  Canon,  p.  168,  and  also  in  a  paper 
by  Thoma  in  Hilgenfeld's  Zeitschrift,  which  I  have  already 
had  occasion  to  quote  for  another  purpose  (p.  72).  Indeed, 
as  Justin  tells  us  that  he  wrote  a  treatise  in  answer  to  Mar- 
cion,  he  could  not  possibly  have  engaged  in  that  controversy 
without  a  knowledge  of  the  Pauline  writings.  Thoma,  how 
ever,  imagines  that  the  fact  that  Justin  does  not  quote  Paul 
by  name  implies  that  he  did  not  attribute  to  him  Apostolic 
authority.  But  this  inference  is  inconsistent  with  the  in 
fluence  that  Paul's  writings  evidently  exercised  over  Justin's 
thoughts ;  and  is  certainly  not  justified  when  we  remember 
that  it  is  not  Justin's  habit  to  quote  any  Christian  writer 
by  name,  seeing  that  he  wrote  for  persons  who  recognized 
Apostolic  authority  neither  in  Paul  nor  in  anyone  else.  It 
is  not  superfluous,  however,  to  produce  another  testimony. 
Methodius,  who  was  bishop  of  Olympus,*  in  Lycia,  in 
the  very  beginning  of  the  fourth  century,  was  an  admirer  of 
Justin,  whom  he  quotes  more  than  once.  The  quotation 
with  which  we  are  now  concerned  occurs  in  a  work  by 
Methodius  on  the  Resurrection,  an  extract  from  which  has 

*  This  is  the  account  of  the  earliest  writers  who  cite  him ;  later  autho 
rities  quote  him  as  Bishop  of  Patara,  also  in  Lycia,  and  Jerome  stands 
alone  in  making  him  Bishop  of  Tyre.  It  is  almost  certain  that  in  this 
Jerome  made  a  mistake,  of  the  origin  of  which  Zahn  gives  an  ingenious 
explanation.  Zahn  thinks  that  the  idea  that  Methodius  was  Bishop  of 
Patara  is  also  a  mistake,  originating  in  the  fact  that  the  scene  of  one  of  his 
dialogues  is  laid  in  that  place. 


394  THE   PAULINE   EPISTLES.  [XX. 

been  preserved  by  Photius  (see  p.  363).  But  here  we  have 
occasion  to  see  the  convenience  of  the  modern  device  of 
inverted  commas,  which  enables  us  to  see  at  a  glance  how 
far  a  quotation  is  meant  to  extend.  The  want  of  some  such 
mark  left  it  uncertain  how  much  belonged  to  Justin  and  what 
to  Methodius.  Otto,  in  his  edition  of  Justin,  only  prints  one 
sentence  as  Justin's :  the  next  sentence  is  introduced  with  a 
^o-t ;  but  it  is  free  to  the  reader  to  take  this  as  a  word  used 
by  Photius  in  continuing  his  extract  from  Methodius,  or  as 
itself  part  of  the  extract,  and  as  used  by  Methodius  in  con 
tinuing  his  extract  from  Justin.  The  doubt  has  been  set  at 
rest  by  the  recovery  of  the  passage  of  Methodius  through  a 
source  independent  of  Photius.*  It  has  thus  become  appa 
rent  that  the  second  sentence,  which  contains  a  formal  quo 
tation  from  Paul,  belongs  to  Justin  as  well  as  the  first ;  and 
internal  evidence  confirms  this  conclusion.  Both  Methodius 
and  Justin  assert  the  doctrine  of  a  literal  resurrection  of  the 
body ;  and  both  have  to  answer  the  objection  that  Paul  has 
said  that  *  flesh  and  blood  cannot  inherit  the  kingdom  of 
God'  (i  Cor.  xv.  50).  Methodius  first  gives  his  own  answer, 
namely,  that  what  Paul  here  means  by  '  flesh '  is  not  literal 
flesh,  but  only  the  irrational  impulse  to  fleshly  lusts.  But  he 
goes  on  then  to  cite  Justin's  way  of  dealing  with  the  same 
objection,  in  which  quite  a  different  answer  is  given.  '  True,' 
says  Justin,  '  the  body  does  not  inherit  the  kingdom  of  God  ; 
it  is  inherited  by  the  kingdom  of  God.  That  which  lives 
inherits ;  that  which  is  mortal  is  inherited.  If  the  kingdom 
of  God,  which  is  life,  were  inherited  by  the  body,  life  would 
be  swallowed  up  by  corruption.  But  now  life  inherits  that 
which  had  died,  that  so  death  may  be  swallowed  up  by  life 
unto  victory,  and  that  the  corruptible  should  become  posses 
sed  by  incorruption.'  The  complete  difference  of  this  reply 
from  that  which  Methodius  himself  had  given  is  evidence 
enough  that  he  is  here  quoting  the  words  of  another.  We 
could  easily  believe  without  confirmation,  that  a  work  which 
Methodius — writing  soon  after  A.D.  300 — ascribed  to  Justin 
really  belonged  to  him.  But  some  confirmation  is  found  in 

*  See  Pitra,  Analecta  Sacra,  in.  p.  614;  IV.  p.  201. 


XX.]  THE    EPISTLES   TO   THE   THESSALONIANS.  395 

the  fact  that  an  earlier  writer,  Irenaeus,  who  also  used  Justin, 
has  got  hold  of  the  same  maxim  et  Set  roA^es  ctTretv,  ov  K\r)po- 
j>o/Aet  oAXa  KXrjpovofjLclraL  77  <rap£  (Iren.  v.  9).  Now  what  we 
are  concerned  with  here  is  not  the  goodness  of  this  solution 
of  Justin's,  but  the  fact  that  in  the  middle  of  the  second 
century  the  authority  of  Paul's  Epistles  was  owned  alike 
by  heretics  and  orthodox.  Heretics  thought  that  they  had 
gained  a  palmary  argument  if  they  could  produce  a  saying 
in  these  letters  which  seemed  to  make  in  their  favour ;  and 
the  orthodox  felt  it  to  be  a  matter  of  necessity  that  they 
should  in  some  way  reconcile  their  teaching  with  the  sentence 
so  produced. 

I.  The  Epistles  to  the  Thessalom'ans.—The  foundation  of  the 
Church  at  Thessalonica  is  recorded,  Acts  xvii.  It  took  place 
in  the  year  52,  on  Paul's  second  missionary  journey.  The 
first  Epistle  professes  (iii.  6)  to  have  been  written  on  the 
return  of  Timothy,  whom  Paul  had  sent  from  Athens  on  a 
mission  to  the  Thessalonian  Church.  This  would  be  at 
Corinth  (Acts  xviii.  5)  at  the  end  of  52,  or  beginning  of 
53.  I  am  inclined  to  dismiss,  as  absolutely  frivolous,  the 
objections  which  Baur  and  his  followers  have  made  to  the 
acceptance  of  this  date.  For  there  is  one  passage  in  the 
Epistle — a  passage  which  Baur  has  been  so  uncritical  as 
to  reject  as  un-Pauline — which  carries  on  the  face  of  it  the 
stamp  of  early  date.  I  mean  the  paragraph  (iv.  13-1 8)  which 
treats  of  the  future  happiness  of  those  Christians  who  had 
died  before  the  time  when  the  Apostle  wrote.  The  passage 
manifestly  belongs  to  the  time  when  it  was  thought  likely  to 
be  an  exceptional  thing  for  a  Christian  to  die  before  the 
second  coming  of  our  Lord,  and  when  those  who  themselves 
expected  to  meet  their  Master  on  His  coming  needed  to  be 
consoled  lest  those  dear  friends  whom  death  had  carried  off 
should  lose  somewhat  of  the  felicity  destined  for  the  rest. 
Evidently  it  was  only  at  the  very  beginning  of  Christianity, 
when  the  second  coming  of  our  Lord  was  yearly  expected, 
and  when  deaths  as  yet  had  been  but  few,  that  the  destinies 
of  those  who  departed  before  the  Second  Advent  could 
trouble  the  minds  of  surviving  friends,  or  that  they  could 
be  supposed  in  danger  of  losing  something  which  the  mass 


THE   PAULINE   EPISTLES.  [XX. 

of  Christians  would  enjoy.  Add  to  this,  that  if  the  Epistle 
had  been,  as  has  been  imagined,  fabricated  after  Paul's 
death,  the  forger  would  never  have  attributed  to  the  Apostle 
the  words  '  we  which  remain ' — words  implying  a  belief  on 
his.  part  that  it  was  possible  he  might  live  to  witness  our 
Lord's  coming. 

Looking  on  these  considerations  as  absolutely  decisive,  I 
care  little  to  discuss  petty  objections.*  It  is  a  little  in 
consistent  that,  critics  who  condemn  the  book  of  the  Acts  as 
unhistorical,  constantly,  when  they  come  to  discuss  Paul's 
Epistles,  make  disagreement  with  the  history  in  the  Acts  a 
ground  of  rejection.  In  the  present  case  the  Epistle  corrects 
an  erroneous  impression  which  the  reader  of  the  Acts  might 
easily  receive — I  mean  the  impression  that  Paul  only  spent 
some  three  weeks  in  Thessalonica.  The  foundation  of  so 
flourishing  a  Church  as  the  Epistle  describes  must  have  taken 
longer  time  ;  and  we  learn  from  Phil.  iv.  16  that  his  stay  was 
long  enough  to  allow  time  for  his  PhUippian  friends  twice  to 
send  him  a  gift  of  money.  He  gained  at  Thessalonica  two 
of  his  most  attached  friends — Jason,  whom  we  find  afterwards 
in  Paul's  company  at  Corinth  (Rom.  xvi.  21),  and  Aristarchus, 
who  had  been  charged  with  conveying  the  Thessalonian  con 
tributions  of  money  to  Jerusalem  (Acts  xx.  4),  and  whom  we 
find  afterwards  sharing  Paul's  journey  to  Rome  and  his 
imprisonment  (Acts  xxvii.  2,  Col.  iv.  10,  Philem.  24).  Thus 
we  perceive  that  the  preaching  on  three  Sabbath  days,  which 
Luke  records,  only  represents  that  part  of  the  Apostle's  work 
which  was  done  in  the  Synagogue.  After  that  he  must,  as 
on  a  previous  occasion  at  Antioch  in  Pisidia,  have  turned  to 
the  Gentiles;  for  the  Gentile  element  predominated  in  the 
Thessalonian  Church  (i  Thess.  i.  9,  ii.  14).  But  we  find 
from  Luke's  narrative  of  what  occurred  in  several  cities,  that 

*  One  of  those  petty  objections  is  worth  repeating,  because  it  turns  on 
a  curious  coincidence,  the  discoverer  of  which,  Holsten  (Jahrbucher  f. 
Prot.  Theol.  1877)  regarded  it  as  proof  demonstrative  that  our  Epistle  is 
later  than  the  Apocalypse.  In  Rev.  ii.  2,  we  read,  '  I  know  thy  works, 
and  thy  labour,  and  thy  patience  : '  in  i  Thess.  i.  3,  'Your  work  of  faith, 
and  labour  of  love,  and  patience  of  hope.'  Here  Holsten  contends  we  have 
the  work  of  a  later  Paulinist,  who  has  married  the  three  Johannine  words, 
works,  labour,  and  patience,  to  the  three  Pauline,  faith,  hope,  and  charity. 


XX.]  THE    EPISTLES    TO   THE    THESSALONIANS.  397 

nothing  was  more  resented  by  the  Jews  than  that  one  of 
their  own  nation  should,  instead  of  acquiescing  in  the 
decision  passed  on  his  doctrine  by  the  religious  heads  of 
their  community,  disdainfully  separate  himself  from  his 
countrymen,  and  gather  round  him  a  schismatical  society  of 
Gentiles.  We  find,  in  the  Acts,  that  on  account  of  this  con 
duct,  which  was  regarded  by  the  Jews  as  little  less  than 
apostasy,  Paul  was  hunted  by  persecution  from  city  to  city. 
Five  times,  you  will  remember,  he  received  from  the  Jews  the 
forty  stripes  save  one  (2  Cor.  xi.  24).  If  Baur  had  borne 
these  facts  in  mind,  he  would  scarcely  have  found  a  stumb 
ling-block  in  the  language  in  which  Paul  (ii.  14-16)  expresses 
his  indignation  against  'the  Jews'  who  'forbade  him  to  speak 
to  the  Gentiles,  that  they  might  be  saved.'  There  is  no 
warrant  for  asserting  that  the  words  '  the  wrath  is  come  upon 
them  to  the  uttermost'  (ii.  16)  must  have  been  written  after 
the  destruction  of  Jerusalem.  The  'wrath 'is  the  'indigna 
tion'  of  Dan.  viii.  19,  xi.  36  ;  and  ets  reXos  is  a  common  Old 
Testament  phrase  (Josh.  x.  20  ;  2  Chron.  xii.  12,  xxxi.  i). 

Again,  it  ought  not  to  be  thought  strange  that  in  this 
Epistle  we  should  only  read  of  the  opposition  Paul  met  with 
from  unbelieving  Jews,  and  that  nothing  should  be  said  of 
his  controversies  with  Jewish  Christians.  The  letter  was 
addressed  to  a  Church  which,  as  far  as  we  know,  had  not  yet 
been  visited  by  any  Christian  preacher  but  Paul  and  his 
company.  One  trifling  discrepancy  with  the  Acts  may  be 
admitted.  The  Acts  (xvii.  14)  describe  Silas  and  Timothy  as 
remaining  behind  at  Beroea  when  Paul  was  sent  to  Athens. 
But  it  appears  (i  Thess.  iii.  2)  that  Timothy  had  accompanied 
Paul  to  Athens,  and  had  been  sent  back  by  the  Apostle,  in 
his  anxiety  to  learn  news  of  his  Thessalonian  converts.  The 
two  accounts  agree  in  the  main  fact  that  Paul  was  left  by 
himself  at  Athens,  and  the  trifling  disagreement  shows  that 
one  account  was  not  borrowed  from  the  other. 

Baur  notes  several  coincidences  between  this  and  other 
Pauline  Epistles,*  but  strange  to  say  he  uses  these  to  disprove 

*  i.  5,  i  Cor.  ii.  4 ;  i.  6,  I  Cor.  xi.  i  ;  i.  8,  Rom.  i.  8  ;  ii.  4,  I  Cor.  ii.  4, 
Gal.  i.  10,  2  Cor.  i.  17;  ii.  5,  2  Cor.  vii.  2 ;  ii.  6,  9,  2  Cor.  xi.  9;  ii.  7, 
i  Cor.  iii.  2. 


398  THE   PAULINE   EPISTLES.  [XX. 

the  Pauline  authorship.  He  holds  that  a  letter,  to  be 
genuine,  must  be  Pauline,  but  not  too  Pauline.  If  it  con 
tain  phrases  or  thoughts  for  which  we  cannot  find  a  parallel 
in  Paul's  acknowledged  letters,  Paul  did  not  write  it ;  but  if 
the  flavour  of  Paulinism  be  too  strong  for  Baur's  delicate 
susceptibilities,  he  detects  a  forger  who  betrays  himself  by  a 
clumsy  imitation  of  his  master.  By  such  methods  of  criticism 
it  would  be  easy  to  prove  any  document  spurious. 

The  Second  Epistle  to  the  Thessalonians. — I  said  (p.  34)  that 
I  had  at  one  time  thought  of  treating  the  books  of  the  New 
Testament  in  chronological  order,  beginning  accordingly 
with  St.  Paul's  Epistles.  If  I  had  not  found  other  reasons 
for  choosing  a  different  course,  I  should  have  been  warned 
by  Davidson's  example  to  see  how  much  there  is  arbitrary 
and  uncertain  in  the  chronological  arrangement.  Adopting 
that  plan,  he  began  the  first  edition  of  his  new  Introduction 
with  this  Second  Epistle  to  the  Thessalonians;  for  he  had 
accepted  an  idea  of  Grotius,  which  has  been  received  with 
approval  by  some  subsequent  critics,  that  the  letter  which 
we,  in  conformity  with  universal  Christian  tradition,  call  the 
Second  Epistle,  came  in  order  of  time  before  that  which  we 
count  the  First.  The  arguments  in  support  of  this  opinion  do 
not  seem  to  me  strong  enough  to  induce  me  to  spend  time  in 
discussing  them  with  you.  In  Davidson's  second  edition,  the 
First  Epistle  heads  the  list  of  New  Testament  books;  we  have 
to  look  a  long  way  down  before  we  come  to  the  Second ;  for 
it  is  now  pronounced  to  be  not  genuine,  but  a  later  book 
than  the  Apocalypse  of  St.  John.  On  the  greater  part  of  the 
arguments  used  for  rejecting  the  book,  I  hardly  think  that 
Davidson  himself  can  place  much  reliance.  Thus,  on 
comparing  the  opening  of  the  two  Epistles,  he  pronounces 
the  Second  un-Pauline,  because,  whereas  Paul  in  the  First 
Epistle  had  said  '  we  give  thanks,'  the  Second  Epistle  says 
*  we  are  bound  to  thank  God  always  as  is  meet:'  whereas 
Paul  had  contented  himself  with  speaking  of  his  converts' 
faith  and  love,  this  writer  exaggerates,  and  says  that  their 
faith  groweth  exceedingly  and  their  love  aboundeth.  There 
is  a  great  deal  more  of  what  I  count  '  childish '  criticism : 
that  is  to  say,  criticism  such  as  might  proceed  from  a  child 


XX.]  THE   EPISTLES   TO   THE   THESSALONIANS.  399 

who  insists  that  a  story  shall  be  always  told  him  in  precisely 
the  same  way.  For  instance,  the  commencement  of  ii.  n 
with  the  words  *  And  for  this  cause/  is  pronounced  to  be 
un-Pauline.  Paul,  we  are  gravely  told,  would  have  said, 
'  For  this  cause/  without  the  '  and.'  When  the  list  of  un- 
Pauline  phrases  is  exhausted,  Davidson,  following  Baur's 
lead,  goes  on  to  condemn  the  Epistle  for  its  too  great 
likeness  to  Paul.  The  ideas  are  often  borrowed  or  repeated 
from  the  First  Epistle,  and  it  is  dependent  on  other  Pauline 
Epistles.* 

I  hardly  think  it  can  be  any  of  these  arguments  which  in 
duced  Davidson  to  alter  the  opinion  he  expressed  in  his  first 
edition,  where  he  says  (p.  27)  '  The  opinion  of  those  critics 
who  defend  the  authenticity  of  the  First  Epistle,  but  reject 
that  of  the  Second,  seems  most  improbable,  and  is  a  media 
tizing  view  that  cannot  stand.  Both  must  go  together  either 
in  adoption  or  rejection.  Baur  is  consistent  in  rejecting 
them  ;  Hilgenfeld  will  have  few  followers  in  maintaining  the 
Pauline  origin  of  the  one,  and  disputing  that  of  the  other/ 
How  is  it,  then,  that  the  prophet  should  so  soon  do  his  best 
to  falsify  his  own  prediction  by  becoming  a  follower  of 
Hilgenfeld  himself? 

The  reason  for  rejecting  the  Epistle  can  scarcely  have  been 
drawn  from  any  of  the  small  cavils  of  which  I  have  given  you 
specimens.  The  stumbling-block  is  found  in  the  prophecy 
of  the  Man  of  Sin  (ii.  1-12).  It  is  not  necessary  for  me  to 
entangle  you  in  any  of  the  controversies  which  spring  out  of 
questions  of  interpretation  of  prophecy.  We  are  here  only 
concerned  with  the  question  of  authorship — whether  there  is 
anything  improbable  in  the  supposition  that  such  a  prophecy 
should  have  been  delivered  at  the  date  it  must  have  been,  if 
this  Epistle  was  really  written  by  St.  Paul.  Now  considering 
the  paucity  of  documents  from  which  our  knowledge  is  derived 
of  the  growth  of  opinion  in  the  Apostolic  age,  and  for  half  a 

*  2  Thess.  iii.  8  repeats  I  Thess.  ii.  9 ;  and  iii.  10,  12,  expands  I  Thess. 
iv.  n,  12 ;  2  Thess.  iii.  14,  follows  I  Cor.  v.  9,  ii  ;  compare  also  I  Cor. 
iv.  14.  'The  Lord  of  peace'  (iii.  16)  is  taken  from  I  Cor.  xiv.  33,  2  Cor. 
xiii.  ii ;  2  Thess.  ii.  2,  iii.  4,  iii.  13,  are  derived  from  Gal.  i.  6,  v.  10, 
vi.  9,  respectively.  The  reader  must  decide  whether  he  will  take  these 
coincidences  as  arguments  for  or  against  the  Pauline  authorship. 


400  THE   PAULINE    EPISTLES.  [XX. 

century  after  the  death  of  the  last  Apostle,  I  cannot  sufficiently 
admire  the  courage  of  critics  who,  from  their  own  sense  of 
the  fitness  of  things,  assign  dates  for  the  first  appearance  of 
each  phase  of  ritual  or  doctrine,  and  then  condemn  any  docu 
ment  that  refuses  to  fall  in  with  their  theory.  It  is  true  that 
apocalyptic  prediction  is  in  our  minds  chiefly  associated  with 
the  Book  of  the  Revelation  of  St.  John;  but  I  know  no  reason 
whatever  for  imagining  that  it  was  only  about  the  year  70  that 
the  minds  of  Christians  began  to  occupy  themselves  with  the 
thoughts  of  the  second  coming  of  our  Lord,  and  the  circum 
stances  that  should  attend  it.  Those  who  own  the  First  Epistle 
must  allow  that  at  the  time  when  that  was  written  the  second 
coming  of  our  Lord  had  a  prominent  place  in  the  Apostle's 
teaching.  There  are  traces  also  that  the  prophecies  of  Daniel 
were  studied  in  connexion  with  that  event;  and  in  this  Chris 
tians  seem  to  have  had  the  sanction  of  their  Master.  Taking 
the  very  lowest  view  of  the  authenticity  of  the  Gospels,  it  still 
seems  to  me  unreasonable  to  doubt  that  the  24th  Matthew 
and  the  parallel  chapters  of  the  other  Gospels  record  in  sub 
stance  a  real  discourse  of  our  Lord.  The  description  (Matt, 
xxiv.  30,  31)  of  our  Lord  coming  in  the  clouds  of  heaven  (see 
also  Matt.  xxvi.  64),  and  sending  His  angels  with  a  '  great 
sound  of  a  trumpet,'  seems  to  me  to  have  prompted  both 
St.  Paul's  phrase,  'the  last  trumpet,'  in  i  Cor.  xv.  52,  and 
the  description  in  i  Thess.  iv.  of  our  Lord  descending  with 
the  voice  of  the  archangel,  and  the  trump  of  God,  when  His 
people  should  be  caught  up  to  Him  in  the  clouds.  It  is 
undeniable  then  that,  long  before  the  year  70,  eschatological 
speculation  was  a  subject  of  Christian  thought.  We  have  not 
materials  to  write  its  history,  and  I  marvel  at  the  assurance 
of  the  man  who  pretends  that  he  so  knows  all  about  the  pro 
gress  of  Christian  ideas  on  the  subject  in  the  fifteen  years 
between  54  and  69,  that  while  he  feels  it  to  be  quite  credible 
that  such  a  forecast  of  the  end  of  the  dispensation  as  is  con 
tained  in  2  Thess.  ii.  might  have  been  written  at  the  latter 
of  these  two  dates,  he  is  quite  sure  it  could  not  have  been 
written  at  the  former.  There  would,  indeed,  be  some  foun 
dation  for  such  an  assertion,  if  it  could  be  said  that  the  view 
presented  in  the  Second  Epistle  contradicts  that  taken  in  the 


XX.]  THE   EPISTLES   TO   THE   THESSALONIANS.  401 

first;  but  this  is  not  so.  The  one  Epistle  presents  our  Lord's 
second  coming  as  possibly  soon,  the  other  as  not  immediate 
— as  needing  that  certain  prophetic  preliminary  signs  should 
first  be  fulfilled.  It  is  quite  conceivable  that  the  teaching 
of  the  same  man  should  present  these  two  aspects.  If  no 
argument  for  late  date  can  be  founded  on  the  passage  in 
2  Thess.  which  I  have  been  discussing,  I  know  of  no  other 
worth  attention.  We  do  not  quite  know  what  interval  of 
time  separates  the  two  Epistles.  Perhaps  it  may  be  longer 
than  is  generally  supposed. 

In  respect  of  external  attestation,  no  New  Testament  book 
stands  higher  than  these  Epistles.  They  are  repeatedly  used 
without  suspicion  by  Irenaeus,  Clement,  and  Tertullian.* 
They  are  included  in  the  list  of  Pauline  Epistles  given  in  the 
Muratorian  Fragment  which  I  have  quoted  (p.  50),  They 
were  included  in  the  Apostolicon  of  Marcion  in  the  first  half 
of  the  second  century.  There  are  what  I  count  traces  of  their 
use  by  Clement  of  Rome  (c.  38),  while  their  employment  by 
Ignatius  and  Polycarp  is  so  distinct  that  the  argument  can 
only  be  evaded  by  denying  the  authenticity  of  these  remains. f 
The  passage  about  the  '  Man  of  Sin '  is  plainly  referred  to  by 
Justin  Martyr  (Trypho,  no). 

I  must  not  omit  to  notice  the  token  of  genuineness  given 
at  the  end  of  the  Epistle,  namely,  that  the  salutation  was 
written  with  the  Apostle's  own  hand.  All  Paul's  Epistles 
end  with  the  salutation  in  an  expanded  or  abridged  form, 
'  The  grace  of  the  Lord  Jesus  Christ  be  with  you  all.'  And 
it  appears  that  even  though  the  rest  of  the  Epistle  was  written 
by  an  amanuensis  (as  was  that  to  the  Romans  by  Tertius), 
the  salutation  was  written  by  the  Apostle's  own  hand.  It  is 
remarkable  that  precautions  against  forgery  should  have  been 
so  early  found  necessary.  The  Apostle  shows  also  his  fears 


*  For  example  :  Iren.  v.  6 ;  Clem.  Al.,  Strom,  iv.  12 ;  Tert.  De  Res. 
Cam.  24. 

t  Ignat.  ad  Polycarp.  I,  ad  Ephes.  10;  Polycarp,  cc.  2,  4,  n.  I  am 
disposed  to  agree  with  Zahn,  that  when  Polycarp  speaks  of  epistles  to 
the  Philippian  Church,  it  is  because  the  Epistles  to  the  neighbouring 
Thessalonian  Church  were  united  in  his  collection  with  the  Epistle  to  the 
Philippians.  Polycarp  uses  2  Thess.  i.  4,  as  if  addressed  to  the  Philippiaiis. 

2D 


402  THE   PAULINE   EPISTLES.  [XX. 

of  it  in  cautioning  the  Thessalonians  not  to  be  misled  by  any 
Epistle  as  from  him.  It  is  remarkable  also  that  this  expres 
sion,  'In  every  epistle  so  I  write'  (iii.  17)  should  be  found  in 
only  the  second  of  Paul's  Epistles  which  have  reached  us. 
The  inference  seems  plain  that  Paul  must  have  written  other 
letters  that  have  not  come  down  to  us.  And  this  is  a  con 
clusion  intrinsically  not  improbable,  and  which  I  see  no  rea 
son  for  rejecting.  For  I  suppose  there  is  no  greater  reason 
for  thinking  that  every  letter  of  an  inspired  Apostle  must 
necessarily  be  extant,  than  there  is  for  thinking  that  we  must 
have  an  account  preserved  of  every  sermon  he  preached.  We 
know  from  the  end  of  St.  John's  Gospel,  what  our  own  reason 
would  have  otherwise  told  us,  that  the  portion  of  our  Blessed 
Lord's  own  words  and  deeds  which  His  Spirit  has  preserved 
to  us,  bears  no  proportion  to  that  which  has  been  allowed  to 
remain  unrecorded.  In  the  case  of  Apostolic  letters  we  can 
conceive  that  the  earlier,  before  the  Apostle's  authority  was 
fully  recognized,  would  be  less  carefully  preserved.  If  one 
whom  we  dearly  love  is  removed  from  us  by  death,  we  trea 
sure  up  the  relics  of  his  writings,  and  often  regret  our  own 
carelessness  in  having  allowed  papers  to  be  destroyed  which, 
because  the  writer  was  still  with  us,  we  valued  lightly,  but 
now  would  give  much  to  recover.  There  is  no  improbability, 
then,  in  the  loss  of  Apostolic  letters,  unless  God  worked  a 
miracle  to  preserve  them.  We  may  believe  that  if  the  loss 
would  have  deprived  us  of  knowledge  necessary  for  our  sal 
vation,  He  would  have  interfered  miraculously;  but  otherwise 
we  have  no  ground  for  asserting  that  God  would  supernatu- 
rally  prevent  the  loss  of  any  of  the  written  words  of  the 
Apostles,  when  He  has  permitted  the  loss  of  so  many  of 
the  spoken  words  not  only  of  them  but  of  our  Blessed 
Lord. 

Another  passage  which  implies  a  letter  of  Paul,  not  in 
cluded  in  our  Canon,  is  i  Cor.  v.  9,  'I  wrote  to  you  in  my 
Epistle  not  to  keep  company  with  fornicators,'  which  though 
it  has  been  interpreted  to  mean  in  the  Epistle  he  was  then 
writing,  is,  I  think,  better  understood  as  referring  to  a  lost 
previous  letter.  Colossians  iv.  16,  speaks  of  a  letter  from 
Laodicea.  On  this  Laodicean  letter  I  refer  you  to  Lightfoot's 


XX.]  THE   SECOND   GROUP.  403 

note*  (Colossians,  p.  340),  merely  saying  here  that  I  believe 
the  letter  has  been  rightly  identified  with  that  which  we  know 
as  the  Epistle  to  the  Ephesians. 

II.  We  come  now  to  the  four  Epistles  whose  genuineness  is 
acknowledged  by  Baur,  viz.  Romans,  First  and  Second  Corin 
thians,  and  Galatians.  There  being  no  necessity  to  give  formal 
proof  of  what  is  not  seriously  disputed,  I  do  not  trouble  myself 
to  lay  before  you  the  external  attestation  to  these  Epistles,  but 
will  only  remark  that,  though  amply  sufficient,  it  is  not  at  all 
superior  to  that  which  can  be  produced  on  behalf  of  some  of 
the  epistles  which  Baur  disputes ;  nay  possibly,  perhaps,  not 
quite  as  strong.  But  what  has  silenced  controversy  is  the 
note  of  early  date  stamped  on  these  Epistles  by  the  character 
of  their  contents.  St.  Luke  has  informed  us  (Acts  xv.)  that 
warm  controversy  arose  in  the  Christian  Church  at  an  early 
period  of  its  history  on  the  question  whether  it  was  obliga 
tory  on  Gentile  converts  to  Christianity  to  submit  to  the  rite 
of  circumcision.  This  question  evidently  would  arise,  as  an 
urgent  practical  one,  the  first  time  that  heathen  were  ad 
mitted  in  any  numbers  into  the  Church,  and  would  have  to 
be  speedily  settled  one  way  or  other ;  and,  in  point  of  fact,  it 
was  settled  so  rapidly  that  Christian  literature  is  almost  silent 
on  the  subject.  It  is  dealt  with  in  the  letters  now  under  con 
sideration,  which  not  only  bear  indisputable  marks  of  common 
authorship,  but  have  every  appearance  of  having  been  written 
at  nearly  the  same  time.  In  no  other  New  Testament  book 
do  we  find  any  trace  of  a  struggle  to  impose  on  Gentile  con 
verts  the  obligation  of  circumcision,  nor  is  there  any  sign  of 
controversy  on  the  subject  in  the  documents  of  the  sub- 


*  The  reader  will  find  in  Lightfoot  the  forged  Epistle  to  the  Laodiceans, 
which  was  clearly  intended  to  pass  for  the  Epistle  referred  to  in  the  Colosr 
sians.  It  is  only  extant  in  Latin ;  but  Lightfoot  gives  good  reasons  for 
believing  the  original  language  to  have  been  Greek.  It  is  short,  and  is  a  mere 
cento  of  passages  from  the  genuine  letters,  containing  scarcely  a  single 
original  word.  It  was  in  circulation  in  St.  Jerome's  time  (De  Viris  Illust. 
5),  and  had  previously  been  mentioned  by  Theodore  of  Mopsuestia  (in 
Coloss.iv.  16,  i.  314,  Swete).  It  is  doubtful  whether  it  is  this  Epistle 
which  is  referred  to  in  the  Muratorian  Fragment  (see  p.  50) ;  for  we  should 
not  otherwise  take  this  forgery  to  be  so  early.  Marcion  had  in  his  Canon 
an  Epistle  to  the  Laodiceans,  but  this  was  only  what  we  know  as  the 
Epistle  to  the  Ephesians  (Tert.  adr.  Marc,  v.  17). 

2   D  2 


404  THE    PAULINE    EPISTLES.  [XX. 

Apostolic  age,  such  as  the  Epistles  of  Barnabas  and  Clement 
and  the  Shepherd  of  Hermas.  Nay,  the  pseudo-Clementine 
Homilies,  though  intensely  Jewish  in  their  character,  and 
bitterly  opposed  to  Paul,  make  no  attempt  to  re-open  this 
question ;  and  the  principle  for  which  Paul  contended  is 
acquiesced  in,  namely,  that  uncircumcised  men  might  be 
members  of  the  Christian  Church.  There  can,  therefore, 
be  no  doubt  as  to  the  early  date  of  letters  which  exhibit 
this  long-buried  controversy  as  the  burning  question  of  the 
day. 

A  second  note  of  early  date  is  what  these  letters  dis 
close  as  to  the  resistance  made  at  the  time  of  their  composi 
tion  to  the  acknowledgment  of  Paul's  Apostolic  authority. 
With  the  multiplication  of  Churches,  claiming  Paul  as  their 
founder,  his  Apostleship  soon  ceased  to  be  disputed  within 
the  pale  of  the  Christian  Church  ;  nay,  from  a  very  early 
period  he  came  to  be  habitually  spoken  of  as  the  Apostle,  a 
title  which  he  no  doubt  owed  to  the  fact  that  his  letters  soon 
ceased  to  be  the  exclusive  property  of  the  several  Churches  to 
which  they  were  addressed,  and  became  the  manual  of  Apos 
tolic  instruction  used  in  the  public  reading  of  widely-separated 
Churches.  But  it  appears  that  the  party  which  insisted  on 
the  necessity  of  circumcision  set  aside  Paul's  opposition  by 
disparaging  his  authority  as  inferior  to  that  of  the  original 
Twelve.  Consequently  in  two  of  the  Epistles  now  under 
consideration  the  assertion  and  establishment  of  Paul's  claims 
to  Apostolic  authority  have  a  prominent  place.  It  is,  therefore, 
a  note  of  high  antiquity  that  it  should  have  been  necessary, 
when  these  letters  were  written,  to  give  elaborate  proof  of 
what  very  soon  no  one  within  the  pale  of  the  Church  dreamed 
of  doubting. 

St.  Luke  informs  us  (Acts  xv.)  that  it  was  after  Paul's  first 
missionary  journey  in  which  '  the  door  of  faith  had  been 
opened  to  the  Gentiles,'  that  controversy  was  first  raised  at 
Antioch  by  visitors  from  Jerusalem,  who  insisted  on  the  cir 
cumcision  of  the  new  converts.  We  are  told  that,  in  conse 
quence  of  these  disputes,  Barnabas  and  Paul  went  up  to 
Jerusalem,  where  an  arrangement  was  made  as  to  the  obli 
gations  of  Gentile  Christians,  on  terms  satisfactory  to  Paul. 


XX.]  THE   EPISTLE   TO   THE   GALATIANS.  405 

We  are  told,  then,  that  Paul  made,  in  company  with  Silas,  a 
second  missionary  journey,  in  which  he  made  known  the  terms 
of  this  arrangement  to  the  Churches  previously  formed,  and, 
no  doubt,  gave  corresponding  instruction  to  the  new  Churches 
which  he  founded.  Among  these  new  Churches  were  those  of 
Macedonia ;  and  it  is  a  confirmation  of  St.  Luke's  account 
of  the  success  of  Paul's  visit  to  Jerusalem  in  the  suppression 
of  disputes  for  a  time,  that  in  the  Epistles  to  the  Thessalonians 
Paul  complains  of  no  adversaries  but  the  unbelieving  Jews, 
and  finds  it  necessary  to  give  no  warning  against  Jewish 
Christians,  who  strove  to  impose  the  yoke  of  circumcision 
on  the  Gentiles.  There  is  a  striking  difference  of  tone 
when  we  take  up  the  Epistle  to  the  Galatians,  which  has 
every  mark  of  having  been  written  under  a  tumult  of  fresh 
feelings  of  surprise,  grief,  and  indignation,  roused  by  the 
tidings  that  converts,  whom  he  had  had  every  reason  to  be 
lieve  to  be  warmly  attached  to  him  (iv.  15),  had  given  a 
credulous  hearing  to  men  who  disparaged  his  authority,  and 
had  been  induced  by  them  to  believe,  in  opposition  to  what 
St.  Paul  had  taught  them,  that  they  could  not  be  saved 
unless  they  submitted  to  circumcision,  and  other  Mosaic 
ordinances. 

Accordingly,  the  Epistle  begins  by  an  assertion  of  his  Apos- 
tleship.  It  is  known  that  the  name  '  Apostle '  was  given  by 
the  Jews  to  the  envoys  despatched  by  the  rulers  of  their  race 
on  any  foreign  mission,  especially  to  those  charged  with  col 
lecting  the  Temple  tribute.  We  learn  from  the  'Teaching 
of  the  Twelve  Apostles '  (see  Lect.  xxvi.)  that  in  the  Jewish 
Christian  Churches  the  same  name  continued  to  be  given  to 
missionaries  sent  forth  from  the  mother  Church.  We  may, 
therefore,  reasonably  conjecture  that  the  name  'Apostle' 
was  claimed  by  the  visitors  from  Judea,  who,  as  formerly  at 
Antioch,  inculcated  on  the  Gentile  Churches  the  necessity 
of  circumcision.  We  can  thus  understand  the  emphasis  with 
which  Paul  declares  at  the  outset  that  he  was  an  Apostle,  but 
not  as  being,  like  them,  an  emissary  sent  by  men ;  nay,  further, 
that  the  Divine  commission  which  he  claimed  to  have  received 
had  not  been  given  him  through  the  instrumentality  of  men, 
but  directly  by  our  Lord  Himself.  He  proceeds,  by  a  narra- 


406  THE    PAULINE    EPISTLES.  [XX. 

tive  of  his  own  history,  to  vindicate  his  claim  to  speak  with 
authority  independent  of  the  other  Apostles,  showing  at  the 
same  time  that  his  teaching  had  their  full  sanction. 

Passing,  then,  from  the  personal  question,  he  argues  that  the 
Gentiles,  by  submission  to  the  law  of  Moses,  would  surrender 
their  claim  to  an  inheritance  of  earlier  date  than  Moses, 
namely,  the  covenant  of  promise  made  by  God  with  Abraham, 
400  years  before  Moses.  The  promise  was  given  to  Abraham 
because  of  his  faith — '  He  believed  God,  and  it  was  counted 
to  him  for  righteousness ' — and  it  was  made  to  Abraham  and 
his  seed.  That  seed  was  Christ,  and  they  are  to  be  counted 
the  true  seed  of  Abraham  who  are  Christ's,  and  who  have  the 
faith  of  Abraham.  As  for  those  Israelites  after  the  flesh,  who 
were  under  bondage  to  the  Mosaic  Law,  they  might  be 
children  of  Abraham,  but  not  heirs  of  the  promises  to 
Abraham.  Abraham  had  two  sons,  the  one  by  a  bondmaid, 
the  other  by  a  free  woman ;  the  one  born  after  the  flesh,  the 
other  through  the  promise.  As  then,  so  now,  he  that  was 
born  after  the  flesh  persecuted  him  that  was  born  after  the 
Spirit.  But  what  saiththe  Scripture?  Cast  out  the  bondmaid 
and  her  son;  for  the  son  of  the  bondmaid  shall  not  be  heir 
with  the  son  of  the  freewoman. 

But,  though  the  heirs  of  promise  must  not  now  be  under 
bondage  to  the  law,  there  had  been  a  time  when  they  had 
been  rightfully  under  subjection  to  it.  The  heir,  as  long  as 
he  is  a  child,  is  under  subjection  to  tutors  and  governors 
appointed  by  the  father.  The  law  had  a  temporary  use  in 
training  and  preparing  for  Christ  those  who  had  for  a  time 
been  placed  in  subjection  to  it.  It  made  men  conscious  of 
sin,  and  pronounced  a  curse  on  disobedience,  from  which 
itself  was  powerless  to  deliver.  Thus,  the  impossibility  of 
obtaining  justification  by  the  law  being  made  evident,  it 
became  clear  that  it  is  only  by  faith  that  the  just  can  live — 
faith  in  Christ,  who  has  redeemed  us  from  the  curse  of  the 
law,  being  made  a  curse  for  us.  So  under  the  tutorship  of 
the  law,  men  were  taught  to  seek  salvation  through  faith 
through  the  promise  to  Christ;  a  promise  not  limited  to 
one  nation,  for  God  said  to  Abraham,  '  In  thee  shall  all 
nations  of  the  earth  be  blessed.'  It  matters  not  whether  a 


XX.]  THE    EPISTLE   TO    THE    ROMANS.  407 

man  be  Jew  or  Greek,  bond  or  free ;  if  he  be  Christ's  he  is 
Abraham's  seed,  and  heir  of  his  promise. 

An  abstract  has  here  been  given  of  so  much  of  the 
argument  of  the  Epistle  to  the  Galatians  as  is  necessary 
for  comparison  with  the  Epistle  to  the  Romans,  which  of 
all  Paul's  letters  has  the  closest  affinity  with  the  Epistle 
under  consideration. 

To  speak,  first  of  the  points  of  likeness,  we  find  (Rom.  iv.  3) 
the  same  Old  Testament  passage  quoted,  '  Abraham  believed 
God,  and  it  was  counted  unto  him  for  righteousness '  (Gal. 
iii.  6),  and,  it  may,  he  added,  with  a  formula  of  citation  used 
also  in  Galatians  (iv.  30),  *  What  saith  the  Scripture  ? '  And 
the  same  argument  is  founded  on  it.  The  promise  was 
made  to  Abraham  not  through  the  law,  not  as  earned  by  any 
works,  but  through  the  righteousness  of  faith  :  it  was  ante 
cedent  to  the  law ;  nay,  antecedent  to  the  institution  of  the 
rite  of  circumcision ;  the  promise,  therefore  belongs  to  those 
who  have  like  faith  to  that  which  Abraham  had  before  he  was 
circumcised.  Thus,  in  fulfilment  of  the  promise  that  Abra 
ham  should  be  father  of  many  nations,  his  children  are  not 
limited  to  the  Jewish  nation.  Nay,  those  who  are  merely  his 
descendants  after  the  flesh,  are  not  his  true  children.  '  Neither 
because  they  are  Abraham's  seed,  are  they  all  children;  but, 
"  in  Isaac  shall  thy  seed  be  called."  That  is,  it  is  not  the 
children  of  the  flesh  that  are  children  of  God :  but  the 
"children  of  the  promise"  are  counted  for  the  seed'  (Rom. 
ix.  7,  8).  This  is  the  same  argument  as  that  which  leads 
up  (Gal.  iv.  28)  to  the  statement,  '  We  brethren,  as  Isaac 
was,  are  children  of  the  promise.' 

Again  in  the  Epistle  to  the  Romans,  as  well  as  in  that  to 
the  Galatians,  the  Apostle  has  to  deal  with  the  difficulty, 
how  is  he  to  reconcile  his  admission  that  the  Mosaic  Law 
came  from  God,  with  his  teaching  that  it  is  not  binding  on 
Christians  ?  And  in  Rom.  vii.  he  expounds  a  doctrine  as  to  the 
temporary  uses  served  by  the  Mosaic  Law  identical  with 
that  in  the  Epistle  to  the  Galatians;  so  that  the  former 
exposition  has  been  employed  to  clear  up  ambiguity  in  the 
latter  (see  Gal.  iii.  19). 

Beside  the  general  agreement  in  the  arguments  by  which 
in  both  Epistles  the  same  thesis  is  maintained,  viz.,  that  *  by 


408 


THE   PAULINE   EPISTLES. 


[xx. 


the  works  of  the  law  shall  no  flesh  be  justified  '  (Gal.  ii.  16  ; 
Rom.  iii.  20),  there  are  considerable  verbal  agreements,  so 
numerous  as  not  only  to  leave  no  doubt  that  both  letters  had 
the  same  author,  but  also  to  suggest  that  the  composition  of 
the  two  could  not  be  separated  by  any  long  interval  of  time. 
Thus  the  words  of  the  thesis  just  quoted  are  taken  from  Psalm 
cxliii.  2,  but  modified  in  both  places  in  the  same  way,  viz., 
by  the  introduction  of  the  phrase,  '  the  works  of  the  law,'  and 
by  the  alteration  of  'no  man  living'  into  'no  flesh.'  The 
yth  of  Romans  just  referred  to  speaks  (15-23)  of  the  conflict 
in  a  man  between  the  '  law  in  his  members '  and  the  '  law  in 
his  mind,'  the  result  of  which  is  that  his  conduct  is  constantly 
different  from  that  which  his  will  approves.  There  is  a 
quite  parallel  passage  (Gal.  v.  17),  and  in  both  places  the 
remedy  for  the  misery  of  this  conflict  is  shown  to  be  to 
'  walk  by  the  Spirit.'  A  few  examples  of  parallel  passages 
may  be  added  : — 

Rom.  viii.  14-17  :  For  as  many 
as  are  led  by  the  Spirit  of  God,  they 
are  the  sons  of  God.  For  ye  have 
not  received  the  Spirit  of  bondage 
again  to  fear ;  but  ye  have  received 
the  Spirit  of  adoption,  whereby  we 
cry,  Abba,  Father.  The  Spirit 
itself  beareth  witness  with  our  spirit, 
that  we  are  children  of  God :  and 
if  children,  then  heirs ;  heirs  of 
God,  and  joint-heirs  with  Christ. 

Rom.  vi.   6-8 :  Our  old   man  is 


Gal.  iv.  5-7 :  That  we  might  re 
ceive  the  adoption  of  sons.  And 
because  ye  are  sons,  God  hath  sent 
forth  the  Spirit  of  his  Son  into 
your  hearts,  crying,  Abba,  Father. 
Wherefore  thou  art  no  more  a  ser 
vant,  but  a  son  ;  and  if  a  son,  then 
an  heir  of  God  through  Christ. 


crucified  with  him.  .  .  .  Now  if  we 
be  dead  with  Christ,  we  believe  that 
we  shall  also  live  with  him. 

Rom.  xiii.  9  :  [The  law]  is  briefly 
comprehended  in  this  saying,  namely, 
Thou  shalt  love  thy  neighbour  as 
thyself.  .  .  .  Love  is  the  fulfilling 
of  the  law. 

Rom.  xv.  15  :  Grace  was  given  me 
of  God  that  I  should  be  a  minister 
of  Christ  Jesus  unto  the  Gentiles. 

Rom.  xi.  13  :  Inasmuch  as  I  am 
an  apostle  of  Gentiles. 


Gal.  ii.  20 :  I  am  crucified  with 
Christ :  nevertheless  I  live  :  yet  not 
I,  but  Christ  liveth  in  me. 

Gal.  v.  14:  All  the  law  is  ful 
filled  in  one  word,  namely :  Thou 
shalt  love  thy  neighbour  as  thyself. 


Gal.  ii.  7  :  I  had  been  entrusted 
with  the  Gospel  of  the  uncircum- 
cision  as  Peter  with  the  Gospel  of 
the  circumcision;  forhethat  wrought 
for  Peter  unto  the  apostleship  of  the 
circumcision,  wrought  for  me  also 
with  the  Gentiles. 


XX.]        THE    SECOND    EPISTLE   TO   THE    CORINTHIANS.  409 

This  list,  which  might  be  considerably  extended,  is  enough 
to  put  beyond  controversy  the  close  affinity  of  the  two 
Epistles.  But  there  is  a  striking  difference.  We  do  not  find 
in  the  Epistle  to  the  Romans  any  of  those  autobiographical 
details  with  which  the  Epistle  to  the  Galatians  opens.  The 
writer  seems  to  feel  himself  under  no  necessity  to  vindicate 
his  Apostleship,  or  his  right  to  speak  with  as  much  authority 
as  the  original  Twelve.  Paul's  claim  to  be  an  Apostle  is 
made  in  the  opening  salutation,  and  repeated  (xi.  13),  but  it 
is  not  treated  as  likely  to  be  contested,  or  as  needing  proof. 
Further,  the  Epistle  to  the  Romans  is  a  calm  exposition  of 
Christian  doctrine,  without  any  trace  of  the  personal  feelings 
which  exhibit  themselves  so  strongly  in  the  Epistle  to  the 
Galatians.  No  doubt  this  difference  is  to  a  certain  extent 
accounted  for  by  the  fact  that  Paul  in  writing  to  the  Church 
of  Rome,  a  place  that  he  had  not  yet  visited,  was  addressing 
comparative  strangers  ;  while,  in  writing  to  the  Galatians,  he 
could  not  but  be  deeply  moved  by  grief  and  indignation,  that 
converts  who  had  once  shown  the  strongest  personal  attach 
ment  to  him  should  now  appear  to  be  abandoning  his  teaching. 
This  consideration  sufficiently  accounts  for  the  difference  of 
tone  between  the  two  letters,  but  not  for  the  absence  of  any 
indication  that  the  writer  expected  his  claim  to  Apostleship 
to  be  contested  ;  and,  therefore,  the  most  natural  inference  is, 
that  the  Epistle  to  the  Romans  was  written  later  than  the 
Epistle  to  the  Galatians,  and  at  a  time  when  Paul's  authority 
had  ceased  to  be  disputed. 

This  inference  is  confirmed  when  we  include  in  our  exami 
nation  the  Second  Epistle  to  the  Corinthians.  This  Epistle 
exhibits  Paul  as  then  opposed  by  men  who  disparaged  his 
Apostolic  authority,  as  much  hurt  by  the  ingratitude  of  some 
of  his  converts,  and  as  anxious  in  his  mind  as  to  the  reception 
he  should  meet  with  when  he  should  arrive.  The  Epistle  to 
the  Romans,  written  after  his  arrival  in  Corinth,  shows  that 
the  attempt  to  dispute  his  Apostleship  had  entirely  collapsed, 
and  that  he  could  write  in  complete  tranquillity  of  mind. 
There  is  strong  likeness — less,  however,  in  verbal  expression 
than  in  general  tone  of  feeling — between  the  manner  in  which 
disparagement  of  Paul's  authority  is  dealt  with  in  2  Cor.  and 


410  THE    PAULINE    EPISTLES.  [XX. 

in  Galatians.*  But  though  the  personal  question  is  dealt 
with  in  2  Cor.,  we  do  not  find  there  the  argumentation 
against  the  necessity  of  circumcision  which  occupies  so  much 
of  the  Epistles  to  the  Romans  and  Galatians.  This  favours 
Lightfoot's  view,  that  the  tidings  which  elicited  the  Epistle 
to  the  Galatians  reached  Paul  later  than  the  composition  of 
the  Second  Epistle  to  the  Corinthians.  The  First  Epistle 
to  the  Corinthians  is  not  without  coincidences  with  that  to 
the  Galatians,f  though  fewer  in  number,  as  is  natural,  if 
Lightfoot's  arrangement  of  the  order  of  the  Epistles  is  right. 
It  does  not  need  explanation,  that  circumcision  should,  in  the 
last  passages  which  I  quote  in  the  note,  be  treated  as  a  thing 
indifferent,  but  that  the  insisting  on  circumcision  as  necessary 
to  salvation  should  be  treated  (Gal.  v.  2)  as  subversive  of  the 
Gospel  of  Christ. 

The  generally  received  chronology  of  Paul's  life  assigns  the 
second  missionary  journey  in  which  the  Apostle  went  through 
'the  Phrygian  and  Galatian  country'  to  the  years  51  and  52, 
and  the  third  journey  in  which  he  visited  the  same  districts 
again  to  the  year  54.  Then  succeed  three  years  at  Ephesus, 
shortly  before  leaving  which  place,  in  57,  he  writes  the  First 
Epistle  to  the  Corinthians.  From  Ephesus  he  travels  through 
Macedonia,  and  arrives  at  Corinth,  before  leaving  which 
place,  in  58,  he  writes  his  Epistle  to  the  Romans. 

Before  quitting  this  subject  I  must  say  something  as  to  the 
ambiguity  of  the  name  *  Galatia.'  It  may  be  a  geographical 
term,  denoting  the  district  lying  north  of  Phrygia  and  Cappa- 
docia,  which  derived  its  name  from  the  Gallic  tribes  which 
found  a  settlement  there,  and  which  was  divided  into  three 
cantons,  whose  principal  cities  were  :  Pessinus,  at  the  lower 
or  south-western  extremity,  where  it  borders  on  Phrygia ; 
Ancyra,  in  the  centre ;  and  Tavium,  in  the  north-eastern 
extremity,  where  it  borders  on  Pontus.  Or,  Galatia  may  denote 
a  political  division,  viz.,  the  Roman  province  of  Galatia,  which 

*  Lightfoot  gives  the  parallels:  Gal.  iii.  13,  2  Cor.  v.  21  ;  Gal.  vi.  7, 
2  Cor.  ix.  6 ;  Gal.  i.  6,  2  Cor.  xi.  4 ;  Gal.  iv.  14,  2  Cor.  xii.  7  ;  Gal.  vi.  15, 
2  Cor.  v.  17;  Gal.  iv.  17,  2  Cor.  xi.  2  ;  Gal.  i.  20,  2  Cor.  v.  11  ;  Gal.  iii.  3, 
2  Cor.  viii.  6;  Gal.  i.  9,  v.  21,  2  Cor.  xiii.  2. 

t  i  Cor.  ii.  3,  GaL  iv.  13;  i  Cor,  iv.  6,  Gal.  v.  9;  i  Cor,  vii.  19,  GaL 
v.  6,  vi.  15. 


XX.]  WHAT    MEANT    BY    '  GALATIA.'  411 

included,  in  addition  to  Galatia  proper,  which  has  been  just 
described,  part  of  Phrygia,  Pisidia  and  Lycaonia;  and,  in 
particular,  the  cities  of  Derbe,  Lystra,  Iconium,  and  Antioch, 
Paul's  visits  to  which  on  his  first  missionary  journeys  are 
related  at  length  by  St.  Luke.  Accordingly  Renan  and  others 
suppose  that  it  is  the  Churches  of  these  cities  which  we  are  to 
understand  when  Paul  speaks  of  the  '  Churches  of  Galatia.' 
But  it  is  to  be  observed  that  St.  Luke  never  uses  the  word 
Galatia  in  reference  to  these  cities.  It  is  in  his  account  of 
St.  Paul's  second  and  third  missionary  journeys  that  he  speaks 
of  him  as  traversing  'the  Phrygian  and  Galatian  country* 
(xvi.  6),  and  as  revisiting  the  'Galatian  country  and  Phry 
gia"  (xviii.  23).  This  language  would  lead  us  to  think  of  St. 
Paul,  not  as  evangelizing  Galatia  proper,  but  only  as,  in  the 
course  of  his  northward  journey,  going  through  the  border 
land,  which,  though  politically  Galatia,  was  geographically 
Phrygia.  St.  Paul's  letter,  however,  addressed  to  the  Galatians 
(and  see,  in  particular,  iii.  i)  favours  the  opinion  that  the 
Apostle  did  preach  the  Gospel  in  Galatia  proper.  And  we 
are  the  less  disposed  to  press  any  argument  from  St.  Luke's 
silence,  when  we  observe  how  very  little  is  told  of  the  Apostle's 
work  in  Asia  on  this  occasion.  St.  Luke  appears  to  have  first 
joined  Paul's  company  at  Troas  (Acts  xvi.  10),  where  he  finds 
the  Apostle  attended  by  a  new  travelling  companion,  Timothy. 
St.  Luke  would  naturally  hear  from  this  new  friend  the  circum 
stances  of  his  joining  Paul,  and  these,  accordingly,  are  told 
in  the  Acts,  but  scarcely  anything  else  about  Paul's  labours 
before  Luke  had  joined  him.  We  gather,  however,  from  Acts 
xvi.  6,  that  it  had  been  Paul's  original  intention  to  travel  west 
ward  from  Antioch  in  Pisidia  through  the  Roman  province  of 
Asia,  meaning  probably  to  reach  the  sea  at  Ephesus.  We  do 
not  know  in  what  way  the  Divine  intimation  was  given  which 
caused  him  to  alter  his  course  in  a  northerly  direction ;  but 
we  may  reasonably  conjecture  that  hindrances  to  his  journey 
in  the  westward  direction  presented  themselves  which  either 
he  himself  or  some  prophetic  member  of  the  party  instructed 
the  rest  to  recognize  as  providential  guidance.  We  are  tempted 
to  connect  with  this  the  statement  Gal.  iv.  13,  the  most  obvious 
meaning  of  which  is,  that  Paul's  work  in  the  Galatian  district 


412  THE    PAULINE    EPISTLES.  [XX. 

arose  out  of  an  illness  of  his.  The  illness  of  the  Apostle  may 
have  caused  arrangements  to  fall  through  (and,  possibly,  more 
than  once),  which  had  been  made  for  the  journey  into  pro 
consular  Asia.  Renan  concludes,  from  the  fact  that  St.  Luke 
next  tells  of  Paul's  arrival  on  the  borders  of  Mysia,  which  lies 
far  to  the  north-west  of  Antioch  or  Iconium,  that  his  journey 
must  have  been  altogether  in  that  direction,  and  that  we  can 
not  suppose  him  to  have  gone  to  Galatia  proper,  which  would 
be  much  to  the  East  of  his  way.  But  it  is  not  correct  to 
describe  Paul  as  in  this  missionary  journey  '  making  for ' 
Mysia  or  any  other  particular  place.  He  was  evidently 
prepared  to  follow  God's  providential  guidance  whither 
soever  it  might  lead  him.  We  cannot  tell  what  invitations 
to  join  their  party  he  may  have  received  from  Jewish 
acquaintances  proceeding  in  the  Galatian  direction,  or  what 
assurances  of  hospitable  reception  when  they  reached  their 
destination.  Both  Pessinus  and  Ancyra  were  cities  to  which 
Jewish  commercial  speculation  had  made  its  way.  We  may 
infer  from  Gal.  iv.  13  that  a  return  of  illness  obliged  the 
Apostle  to  spend  a  much  longer  time  in  the  Galatian  country 
than  he  had  originally  intended. 

Though  I  understand  the  '  Galatians '  addressed  in  the 
Epistle  to  have  been  inhabitants  of  some  part  of  Galatia 
proper,  I  lay  little  stress  on  explanations  that  have  accounted 
for  the  suddenness  of  the  Galatian  abandonment  of  the  Gospel 
as  taught  by  Paul,  by  the  fact  that  these  people  were  largely 
of  Celtic  extraction,  a  race  proverbial  for  fickleness.  It  may 
be  doubted  whether  Celts  formed  the  predominating  element 
in  the  Churches  of  Galatia,  which  no  doubt  were  also  largely 
recruited  from  the  Greeks  and  Jews,  who  in  considerable 
numbers  dwelt  in  the  same  country.  But,  in  any  case,  men  of 
different  nationalities  share  in  a  common  nature,  and  people 
often  make  mistakes  in  fancying  they  see  tokens  of  national 
peculiarity  in  what  is  but  the  result  of  the  working  of  the 
common  human  nature.  When  the  Galatians  were  first 
converted  they  knew  no  other  Christian  teacher  than  Paul ; 
but  they  learned  from  him  to  recognize  Jerusalem  as  the  head 
quarters  of  the  religion,  and  they  had  heard  of  the  Twelve  as 
having  received  Apostleship  from  Christ  Himself.  It  needs 


XX.]  THE    EPISTLE   TO   THE    ROMANS.  413 

no  theory  as  to  the  race-extraction  of  these  converts  to 
account  for  their  being  profoundly  influenced  when  teachers 
came  among  them,  claiming  to  speak  with  the  authority  of 
the  parent  Church,  and  informing  them  that  new  conditions 
must  still  be  complied  with  before  they  could  be  recognized 
as  perfect  Christians.  Nor  need  we  wonder  if,  when  they 
pleaded  that  Paul,  who  had  founded  their  Church,  had 
never  insisted  on  these  conditions,  they  were  staggered  at 
being  told  that  Paul  himself  had  been  but  a  new  convert,  and 
was  not  one  whose  authority  could  be  set  in  opposition  to 
that  of  the  Apostles  whom  Christ  had  appointed. 

Before  quitting  this  group  of  Epistles,  I  may  mention  some 
doubts  that  have  been  raised  as  to  the  concluding  chapter  of 
the  Epistle  to  the  Romans.  The  Epistle,  previously  to  this, 
closes  with  a  benediction  at  the  end  of  chap.  xv.  Let  me  say, 
in  passing,  that  we  have  one  concluding  benediction  too  many 
in  the  Authorized  Version.  Both  at  xvi.  20,  and  24,  we  have 
'  The  grace  of  our  Lord  Jesus  Christ  be  with  you.  Amen.' 
The  oldest  authorities  differ  as  to  which  place  this  benedic 
tion  ought  to  occupy ;  but  there  is  no  good  MS.  authority 
for  putting  it  in  both  places.  The  Revised  Version  omits  it, 
v.  24.  In  some  MSS.  the  concluding  doxology  (xvi.  25-27)  is 
put  at  the  end  of  ch.  xiv.  In  addition  to  the  fact  that  the 
Epistle  seems  to  finish  without  chap,  xvi.,  it  has  been 
remarked  as  strange  that  Paul  should  have  known  so  many 
at  Rome,  which  he  had  never  visited,  while  he  sends  no 
salutation  to  individuals  in  his  Epistle  to  the  Church  of 
Ephesus,  where  he  had  lived  three  years.  On  these  grounds 
some  reject  this  chapter.  Renan  imagines  that  the  Epistle 
was  a  circular  addressed  to  different  Churches,  with  a  different 
conclusion  for  each,  and  with  his  usual  courage  he  picks  out 
their  several  portions.  He  assigns  the  list  of  names  to  whom 
salutations  were  sent,  as  the  conclusion  of  the  Epistle  sent  to 
one  Church,  that  of  Ephesus  ;  the  list  of  names  from  whom 
salutations  are  sent  as  the  conclusion  of  that  to  another,  and 
the  doxology  as  of  that  to  a  third.  Strange  not  to  see  that 
these  three  fit  together,  and  make  an  harmonious  whole. 

I  cannot  seriously  discuss  what  is  asserted  with  so  little 
evidence.  It  is  no  uncommon  thing  with  ourselves  to  add  a 


41 4  THE   PAULINE   EPISTLES.  [XX. 

postscript  to  a  letter,  and  there  is  nothing  to  call  for  explana 
tion  if  Paul,  even  though  he  had  brought  his  letter  to  a  close 
in  the  i5th  chapter,  should  add  a  postscript.  Considering 
how  people  pressed  to  Rome  from  all  parts  of  the  Empire,  we 
have  nothing  to  wonder  at  if  Paul  had  many  friends  at  Rome, 
even  though  he  had  not  visited  it.  When  he  did  eventually 
visit  Rome,  there  were  friends  there  who  came  to  meet  him, 
some  as  far  as  Appii  Forum,  a  distance  of  forty-three  miles. 
It  is,  I  own,  a  little  surprising  that  the  Epistle  to  the  Ephe- 
sians  does  not  contain  a  corresponding  list  of  salutations. 
However,  what  has  been  ingeniously  urged  on  the  other  side 
is  worth  mentioning.  It  is  said  that  a  man  writing  to  a  large 
circle  of  friends,  because  it  would  be  invidious  to  mention 
some  names  and  omit  others,  naturally  might  prefer  to  men 
tion  none :  and  that,  accordingly,  in  Paul's  Epistles  to  the 
Churches  where  he  had  personally  laboured,  those  of  Corinth 
and  Thessalonica,  no  names  are  mentioned  ;  while  several 
names  occur  in  the  conclusion  of  the  Epistle  to  the  Church  of 
Colossae,  a  place  where  the  Apostle  apparently  had  never 
been. 

I  should  not  think  it  impossible  that  the  Epistle  to  the 
Ephesians,  as  originally  written,  may  have  contained  a  post 
script  chapter  of  private  salutations  like  that  which  ends  the 
Epistle  to  the  Romans,  and  that  this  postscript  was  not 
copied  when  the  Epistle  was  transcribed  for  the  use  of  other 
Churches.  But,  another,  and  more  common  explanation  is, 
that  the  Epistle  to  the  Ephesians  was  a  circular  not  written 
to  that  Church  exclusively.  Certain  it  is,  some  of  the  most 
ancient  copies  omitted  the  words  ex  'E^eo-w  in  the  inscription. 
Origen,  for  instance,  read,  the  saints  '  that  are,'  and  explained 
rots  OVO-LV  as  the  saints  which  are  really  so  ;  and  in  this  he  is 
followed  by  St.  Basil.  And  the  omission  ofEphesus  is  found 
in  some  very  ancient  MSS.  at  this  day  (»,  B).  But  since  Origen's 
explanation  is  extremely  improbable,  Archbishop  Ussher  con 
jectured  that  the  original  letter  was  a  circular,  containing 
after  the  words  '  the  saints  that  are '  a  blank  for  the  name  of 
the  Church  addressed.  Marcion  filled  it  up  with  the  name 
Laodicea,  and  called  this  the  Epistle  to  the  Laodiceans. 

Lightfoot  has  noted  (Journal  of  Philology,  n.  264)  certain 


XX.]  THE   EPISTLES   OF   THE   IMPRISONMENT.  415 

peculiarities  in  some  MSS.  which  make  it  probable  that  an 
edition  of  the  Epistle  to  the  Romans  also  had  some  circula 
tion  in  which  both  the  name  Rome  in  the  address  and  the 
last  two  chapters  were  omitted.  On  these  peculiarities  he 
founds  the  hypothesis  that  the  Apostle,  at  a  later  period  of 
his  life,  wished  to  give  a  wider  circulation  to  the  Epistle  he 
had  written  to  the  Church  of  Rome ;  that,  in  order  to  adapt 
it  to  this  end,  he  omitted  the  mention  of  Rome  in  the  begin 
ning,  as  also  the  last  two  chapters  containing  personal  matters ; 
and  that  he  then,  for  the  first  time,  added  as  a  termination 
the  doxology,  xvi.  25-27.  This  hypothesis  was  combated  by 
Dr.  Hort  in  the  same  Journal  (in.  51),  and  again  defended  by 
its  author  (in.  193).  The  discussion  will  well  repay  study  ; 
but  the  true  solution  of  the  problem  belongs  to  a  period 
earlier  than  any  extant  Christian  history — the  period,  namely, 
when  the  Epistles  first  passed  out  of  the  exclusive  possession 
of  the  Churches  to  which  they  were  addressed,  and  became 
the  common  property  of  all  Christians. 

III.  The  Epistles  of  the  Imprisonment. — Among  these,  I 
think  it  necessary  to  say  little  concerning  the  Epistle  to  the 
Philippians,  Baur's  objections  to  its  genuineness  having  been 
pronounced  futile  by  critics  not  disposed  to  think  lightly 
of  his  authority — Hilgenfeld,  Pfleiderer,  Schenkel,  Reuss, 
Davidson,  Renan,*  and  others.  Baur  has  pronounced  this 

*  A  Frenchman  cannot  construct  a  drama  without  a  love  story  ;  and 
Kenan,  by  the  help  of  this  Epistle,  with  some  countenance  from  Clem. 
Alex.  (Strom,  iii.  6),  has  contrived  to  find  one  in  the  life  of  St.  Paul.  He 
translates  (Saint  Paul,  p.  148)  7^<rte  crvprye  (Phil.  iv.  3)  'ma  chere 
epouse  ; '  and  when  afterwards  he  has  occasion  to  speak  of  Lydia,  does  so 
with  the  addition,  '  sa  vraie  epouse '  (U Antechrist,  pp.  18,  22).  Hilgen 
feld,  who  will  not  be  suspected  of  any  undue  bias  in  favour  of  Episcopacy, 
interprets  the  passage  of  the  president  of  the  Philippian  Church  :  '  Anstatt 
mit  Kenan  in  yrfi<rie  ffvv&ys  die  Purpurhandlerin  Lydia  von  Paulus  als 
"  meine  liebe  Gemahlin  "  angeredet  werden  zu  lassen,  denkt  man  besser 
an  den  eigentlichen  Vorsteher  der  philippischen  Gemeinde'  (Einleitung, 
p.  345).  If  this  president  were  Epaphroditus,  the  bearer  of  the  letter, 
then  the  address  to  him,  without  mention  of  his  name,  would  be  quite 
intelligible  (see  Dr.  Gwynn's  note  in  the  Speaker"1  s  Commentary}.  Paul's 
earliest  Epistle  (i  Thess.  v.  12)  attests  the  existence  of  an  organised  Chris 
tian  ministry  (see  the  bishop  of  Derry's  Introduction  in  the  Speaker's  Com 
mentary]  ;  the  present  Epistle  (i.  i)  informs  us  that  there  were  Church 
Officers  called  eVur/coTrot  and  StaKovoi.  Both  titles  are  found  again  in  the 
Pastoral  Epistles.  The  former,  as  the  name  of  a  Church  officer,  only 
appears  once  elsewhere  in  N.  T.,  in  Paul's  speech  at  Miletus  (Acts  xx. 


41 6  THE   PAULINE   EPISTLES.  [xx. 

Epistle  to  be  dull,  uninteresting,  monotonous,  characterized 
by  poverty  of  thought,  and  want  of  originality.  But  one  only 
loses  respect  for  the  taste  and  skill  of  the  critic  who  can  pass 
such  a  sentence  on  one  of  the  most  touching  and  interesting 
of  Paul's  letters.  So  far  is  it  from  showing  signs  of  having 
been  manufactured  by  imitation  of  the  other  Epistles,  that  it 
reveals  aspects  of  Paul's  character  which  the  other  letters 
had  not  presented.  In  2  Cor.  we  see  how  the  Apostle  could 
write  when  wounded  by  ingratitude  and  suspicion  from 
children  in  the  faith  who  failed  to  return  his  affection  ;  in 
this  Epistle  how  he  could  address  loving  disciples  for  whom 
he  had  not  a  word  of  rebuke.  Elsewhere  we  are  told  (Acts 
xx.  34;  i  Cor.  ix.  1552  Cor.  xi.  10  ;  i  Thess.  ii.  9  ;  2  Thess. 
iii.  3)  how  the  Apostle  laboured  with  his  own  hands  for  his 
support,  and  declared  that  he  would  rather  die  than  let  the 
disinterestedness  of  his  preaching  be  suspected ;  here  we  find 
(iv.  10-19)  tnat  there  was  no  false  pride  in  his  independence, 
and  that  when  there  was  no  likelihood  of  misrepresentation, 
he  could  gracefully  accept  the  ungrudged  gifts  of  affectionate 
converts.  Elsewhere  we  read  only  of  his  reprobation  of 
Christian  teachers  who  corrupted  the  simplicity  of  the 
Gospel ;  here  we  are  told  (i.  18)  of  his  satisfaction  that,  by 
the  efforts  even  of  those  whose  motives  were  not  pure,  the 
Gospel  of  Christ  should  be  more  widely  published. 

The  Epistle  to  Philemon  being  now  generally  accepted  by  all 
critics  whose  opinion  deserves  respect,  I  need  say  nothing 
about  its  genuineness,  and  have  no  time  for  other  comments 
which  that  charming  letter  suggests. 

The  Epistle  to  the  Colossians. — The  external  attestation  to 
this  letter  is  all  that  can  be  desired.  It  is  only  within  the 
last  fifty  years  that  anyone  has  doubted  it.  It  is  used  without 
suspicion  by  Irenseus,  Clement,  and  Tertullian,  and  was 
included  in  Marcion's  Canon.  The  description  of  our  Lord 
(Col.  i.  15)  as  TrpcoTOTo/cos  TTCUT^S  KTtVews  is  copied  by  Justin 
Martyr  twice  verbally  (Trypho,  85,  138),  and  twice  in 


28).  The  inference  from  Phil.  iv.  3,  that  one  of  the  Church  officers  had 
some  pre-eminence  over  the  others,  does  not  seem  to  me  to  be  negatived 
by  the  fact  that  no  notice  of  such  pre-eminence  appears  in  Polycarp's 
Epistle  to  the  Philippians. 


XX.]  THE   EPISTLE   TO   THE    COLOSSIANS.  417 

substance  (84.  100).  The  same  expression  is  used  by 
Theophilus  of  Antioch  (ii.  22).  Davidson  owns  (ii.  177) 
that,  '  as  far  as  external  evidence  goes,  the  Epistle  is 
unanimously  attested  in  ancient  times.' 

We  turn  then  to  the  internal  evidence;  and  the  most  trying 
test  is  to  examine  the  personal  references  at  the  end  of  the 
Epistle.  On  the  face  of  these  there  appears  a  close  connexion 
with  the  letter  to  Philemon.*  The  same  names  occur  in 
both — Epaphras,  Marcus,  Aristarchus,  Demas,  Lucas — as 
names  of  Paul's  companions,  Onesimus  as  a  bearer  of  both 
letters,  Archippus  as  one  of  those  addressed.  Yet  there  are 
differences  which  preclude  the  idea  that  the  Epistle  to  the 
Colossians  was  manufactured  out  of  the  shorter  Epistle.  The 
longer  Epistle  names  Jesus,  surnamed  Justus,  in  addition  to 
those  mentioned  in  the  shorter ;  while  it  says  nothing  about 
Philemon,  the  principal  personage  in  the  latter.  Tychicus  is 
named  as  the  principal  bearer  of  the  longer  Epistle;  but 
from  the  nature  of  the  case,  Onesimus  alone  would  be 
entrusted  with  the  shorter.  Again,  the  title  fellow-prisonerf 
is  given  to  Aristarchus  in  the  Epistle  to  the  Colossians  ;  but 
in  that  to  Philemon,  it  is  given  not  to  him,  but  to  Epaphras. 
Combining  the  Epistles,  we  obtain  a  clear  and  consistent 
account  of  the  occasion  of  both.  The  fugitive  slave  Onesi 
mus,  formerly  a  resident  at  Colossae,  is  converted  at  Rome  by 
Paul,  who  desires  to  send  him  back  to  his  master.  There  is 
also  with  Paul  at  the  time  another  Colossian,  Epaphras, 
apparently  the  evangelist  of  the  Churches  on  the  Lycus 
(i.  7),  through  whose  affectionate  remembrance  of  these 

*  On  this  connexion  Davidson,  in  his  discussion  of  the  Epistle  to  the 
Colossians,  does  not  say  a  single  word ;  Hilgenfeld  touches  on  it  very 
lightly.  Kenan's  literary  instinct  often  keeps  him  straight  where  German 
critics  had  gone  astray.  He  had  not  been  without  difficulties  as  to  the 
larger  Epistle,  but  he  finds  it  impossible  to  get  over  the  fact  of  the  con 
nexion  of  the  two.  He  says  of  the  Epistle  to  the  Colossians  (Saint  Paul, 
p.  xi.) :  '  Elle  presente  meme  beaucoup  de  traits  qui  repoussent  1'hypo- 
these  d'un  faux.  De  ce  nombre  est  surement  sa  connexite  avec  le  billet  a 
Philemon.  Si  1'epitre  est  apocryphe,  le  billet  est  apocryphe  aussi ;  or, 
peu  de  pages  ont  un  accent  de  sincerite  aussi  prononce  ;  Paul  seul,  autant 
qu'il  semble,  a  pu  ecrire  ce  petit  chef-d'oeuvre.' 

t  The  most  probable  meaning  of  the  title  is  that  these  disciples  shared 
St.  Paul's  lodgings,  and  thereby  voluntarily  subjected  themselves  to  some 
restrictions  of  liberty  from  the  surveillance  of  the  soldier  in  charge  of  him 

2  E 


4-1  8  THE   PAULINE    EPISTLES.  [XX. 

Churches  the  Apostle  has  heard  much  of  their  prosperous 
spiritual  state  (iv.  12,  13).  He  therefore  joins  Onesimus 
with  Tychicus,  whom  he  was  sending  on  a  mission  to  the 
Churches  of  Asia,  and  while  giving  the  former  a  private 
letter  to  his  master,  entrusts  them  jointly  with  a  public  letter 
to  the  Church.  Archippus,  who  is  addressed  in  the  salutation 
of  the  shorter  letter,  is  commonly  supposed  to  have  been  a 
son  of  Philemon :  if  not  that,  he  could  only  have  been  the 
chief  minister  of  the  Church  to  which  he  belonged.  It 
would  seem  from  the  order  in  which  he  is  mentioned  that 
the  scene  of  his  labours  was  not  Colossse,  but  Laodicea. 
Possibly  at  the  time  of  writing,  Philemon  might  also  have 
gone  to  reside  there.  If  this  were  so,  it  would  be  natural 
that  there  should  also  be  a  public  letter  to  the  Church  over 
which  Archippus  presided;  and  we  find  from  iv.  16,  that  in 
point  of  fact  there  was  a  companion  letter  to  be  found  at 
Laodicea.  I  feel  little  doubt  that  this  is  the  letter,  a 
duplicate  of  which  was  taken  by  Tychicus  to  Ephesus. 
where  Paul  had  resided  so  long,  and  which  we  know  as  the 
Epistle  to  the  Ephesians.  But  we  have  not  yet  come  to 
discuss  that  letter :  suffice  it,  then,  to  say  now,  that  on  the 
supposition  of  the  genuineness  of  the  Epistle  to  the 
Colossians  all  the  details  of  Paul's  history  which  are  indicated 
come  out  with  perfect  clearness ;  while,  if  you  want  to  con 
vince  yourselves  of  the  unreasonableness  of  the  opposite 
supposition,  you  have  only  to  take  the  Epistle  to  Philemon — 
acknowledged  to  be  genuine — and  try  to  conceive  how  a 
forger  would  be  likely  to  utilize  its  contents  for  the  manu 
facture  of  a  letter  intended  to  pass  as  contemporaneous.  I 
am  sure  no  forger  could  devise  anything  which  has  such  a 
ring  of  truth  as  the  Epistle  to  the  Colossians. 

What,  then,  are  the  reasons  why  we  are  to  reject  a 
document  coming  to  us  with  the  best  possible  credentials, 
and  presenting  several  characteristics  which  seem  to  exclude 
the  hypothesis  of  fraud  ?  Three  reasons  are  alleged.  The 
first  I  shall  not  delay  to  discuss  at  length :  I  mean  the 
argument  founded  on  the  occurrence  of  certain  words  in 
this  Epistle  which  are  not  found  in  Paul's  previous  letters. 
I  cannot  subscribe  to  the  doctrine  that  a  man  writing  a  new 


XX.]  THE    EPISTLE    TO   THE    COLOSSIANS.  419 

composition  must  not,  on  pain  of  losing  his  identity,  employ 
any  word  that  he  has  not  used  in  a  former  one.  Even  Baur, 
who  acknowledged  only  four  Epistles,  could  hardly  employ 
this  argument  consistently — for  there  are  great  dissimilarities 
between  the  First  and  Second  Epistles  to  the  Corinthians — 
but  when  the  Pauline  authorship  of  the  Epistles  to  the 
Thessalonians  and  to  the  Philippians  is  acknowledged,  as  it 
now  is,  by  all  the  best  critics,  it  is  admitted  that  we  may 
disregard  the  objections  made  by  Baur  to  these  Epistles  on 
the  ground  of  differences  of  phraseology;  and  it  is  recognized 
that  it  is  not  unnatural  that  certain  differences  of  language 
should  show  themselves  in  letters  written  by  Paul  at  some 
distance  of  time  from  each  other.  In  the  course  of  a  few 
years  the  vocabulary  of  any  man  is  liable  to  be  modified,  but 
more  especially  is  this  likely  to  happen  to  one  who,  as  Paul 
did,  goes  about  a  good  deal,  and  converses  with  many  new 
people.*  Critics  strangely  forget  the  probable  influence  on 
Paul's  language  of  his  two  years'  residence  in  Rome.  In  the 
next  century  Rome  was  a  hot-bed  of  heresy,  all  the  leading 
Gnostic  teachers  having  established  schools  there.  We  can 
not  but  think  it  likely  that  in  the  first  century  also  religious 
speculators  of  various  kinds  should  find  their  way  to  Rome, 
and  strive  to  gain  disciples.  What  more  natural  than  that 
some  of  them  should  visit  the  Apostle  in  his  lodgings,  and 
compare  doctrines  with  him  ?  And  might  it  not  be  accounted 
a  note  of  spuriousness  if  letters  alleged  to  be  written  after  a 

*  What  I  have  said  above  was  suggested  by  a  remark  of  Dr.  Mahaffy, 
which  he  has  been  good  enough  to  put  in  writing  for  me  : — 

'The  works  of  Xenophon  show  a  remarkable  variation  in  their  vocabu 
lary.  Thus,  i.  and  II.  of  the  Hellenica,  which  are  his  earliest  writings, 
before  he  travelled,  contain  very  few  lonisms,  Dorisms,  &c.,  and  are 
written  in  very  pure  Attic.  His  later  tracts  are  full  of  un- Attic  words, 
picked  up  from  his  changing  surroundings ;  and,  what  is  more  curious,  in 
each  of  them  there  are  many  words  only  used  by  him  once  ;  so  that,  on  the 
ground  of  variation  in  diction,  each  single  book  might  be,  and  indeed  has 
been,  rejected  as  non-Xenophontic.  This  variation  not  only  applies  to 
words  which  might  not  be  required  again,  but  to  such  terms  as  evavSpia 
(Comm.  3,  3,  12),  varied  to  etyvxia  (Ven.  10,  21),  euroA/iio  (quoted  by 
Stobseus),  avSpft6T'r]s  (Anab.  6,  5,  14),  all  used  only  once.  Ever}'  page  in 
Sauppe's  Lexilogus  Xen.  bristles  with  words  only  used  once  in  this  way. 
Now,  of  classical  writers,  Xenophon  is  perhaps  (except  Herodotus)  the 
only  man  whose  life  corresponded  to  St.  Paul's  in  its  roving  habits,  which 
would  bring  him  into  contact  with  the  spoken  Greek  of  varying  societies.' 

2  E  2 


420  THE    PAULINE    EPISTLES.  [xX. 

long  residence  in  Rome  exhibited  acquaintance  with  no 
phases  of  thought  but  those  which  are  dealt  with  in  the 
earlier  letters  ? 

The  second  objection  is  drawn  from  the  Christology  of  the 
Epistle,  the  view  of  our  Lord's  Person  and  work  which  it 
presents  being  in  close  resemblance  to  the  Logos  doctrine 
of  St.  John.  But  is  it  so  impossible  that  the  doctrine  of  two 
Christian  teachers  should  resemble  each  other  ?  We  have 
evidently  here  to  do  with  an  objection  in  which  one  brought 
up  in  the  faith  of  the  Church  can  feel  no  force  before  he  has 
unlearned  a  good  deal.  But,  without  assuming  anything  as 
to  the  unlikelihood  of  Apostles  disagreeing  on  a  fundamental 
doctrine,  when  once  it  is  acknowledged  that  the  Johannine 
writings,  instead  of  only  originating  late  in  the  second  cen 
tury,  were  the  work  of  a  contemporary  of  St.  Paul,  then  the 
interval  in  time  between  the  composition  of  the  Epistle  to  the 
Colossians  and  of  the  Gospel  of  St.  John  is  reduced  so  much, 
that  it  becomes  very  rash  to  declare  that  what  was  accepted 
as  sound  doctrine  at  the  later  of  the  two  periods  could  not 
have  been  believed  in  at  the  earlier.  Add  that,  when  we 
acknowledge  the  Epistle  to  the  Philippians,  the  celebrated 
Christological  passage  (ii.  5-11)  forces  us  to  attribute  to  Paul 
such  high  doctrine  as  to  our  Lord's  pre-existence  and  as  to 
the  pre-eminent  dignity  which  He  enjoyed  before  His  humi 
liation,  that  I  cannot  understand  how  it  should  be  pronounced 
inconceivable  that  one,  whose  conception  of  Christ  was  that 
expressed  in  the  Philippians,  should  use  concerning  Him  the 
language  we  find  in  the  Colossians. 

The  third  objection  is  the  Gnostic  complexion  of  the  false 
teaching  combated  in  the  Colossian  Epistle,  which,  we  are 
told,  could  not  have  characterized  any  heresy  existing  in  the 
time  of  St.  Paul.  But  how  is  it  known  that  it  could  not  ? 
What  are  the  authorities  which  fix  for  us  the  date  of  the  rise 
of  Gnosticism  with  such  precision  that  we  are  entitled  to 
reject  a  document  bearing  all  the  marks  of  authenticity,  if  it 
exhibit  too  early  traces  of  Gnostic  controversies  ?  The  simple 
fact  is,  that  we  have  no  certain  knowledge  whatever  about 
the  beginnings  of  Gnosticism.  We  know  that  it  was  in  full 
blow  in  the  middle  of  the  second  century.  The  Church 


XX.]  THE   EPISTLE   TO   THE   COLOSSIANS.  421 

writers  to  whom  we  owe  our  best  knowledge  of  it  wrote  at 
the  end  of  that  century  or  the  beginning  of  the  next,  and 
were  much  more  busy  in  refuting  the  forms  of  heresy  then 
prevalent  than  in  exploring  their  antiquities.  But  if  we  de 
sire  to  describe  the  first  appearance  of  Gnostic  tendencies, 
we  have,  outside  the  New  Testament  books,  no  materials ; 
and  if  we  assign  a  date  from  our  own  sense  of  the  fitness  of 
things,  we  are  bound  to  do  so  with  all  possible  modesty. 
'  Bishop  Lightfoot,'  says  Davidson,  '  following  Neander, 
thinks  that  the  Judaic  Gnosticism  combated  in  the  Epistle 
to  the  Colossians  was  a  heresy  expressing  "  the  simplest  and 
most  elementary  conceptions "  of  the  tendency  of  thought, 
so-called ;  one  whose  speculations  were  so  "  vague  and 
fluctuating,"  as  to  agree  with  St.  Paul's  time.'  From  this 
view  Davidson  dissents,  regarding  the  heretical  tenets  of 
the  Colossian  teachers  as  more  definite  than  Lightfoot  re 
presents.  I  myself  fully  believe  the  bishop  to  be  in  the 
right ;  but  for  the  purposes  of  the  present  argument  I  count 
it  absolutely  immaterial  whether  he  is  or  not.  When  we  have 
got  a  well-authenticated  first  century  document,  that  docu 
ment  is  evidence  as  to  the  state  of  opinion  at  the  time  when 
it  was  written ;  and  whether  the  amount  of  Gnostic  opinion 
which  it  reveals  be  much  or  little,  we  have  no  reason  for 
rejecting  its  testimony,  unless  we  have  equally  good  counter 
vailing  testimony.  But  countervailing  testimony  deserving 
of  regard,  in  this  case  there  is  none.  Davidson  says:  '  Light- 
foot  labours  without  effect  to  date  the  opinions  of  the  Colos 
sian  errorists  before  A.D.  70,  for  in  doing  so  he  is  refuted 
not  only  by  Hegesippus,  who  puts  the  first  exhibitions  of 
heretical  Gnosis  under  Trajan,  but  by  Clement  of  Alexandria, 
who  dates  them  under  Hadrian,  and  by  Firmilian  of  Csesarea, 
who  dates  them  long  after  the  Apostles.'  Firmilian  ofCaesarea! 
he  might  as  well  have  said  Theophylact.  I  think  he  misunder 
stands  Firmilian ;  but  it  is  useless  to  discuss  the  point ;  for 
what  possible  value  can  attach  to  the  opinion  which  a  writer 
of  the  middle  of  the  third  century  held  as  to  the  extent  to 
which  Gnosticism  had  prevailed  two  hundred  years  before 
his  own  time  ? 

There  is  no  surer  test  of  the  merit  of  an  historian  than  to 


422  THE   PAULINE   EPISTLES.  [XX. 

observe  what  are  the  authorities  on  which  he  builds  his  story. 
If  you  find  him  relying  on  such  as  are  worthless,  you  may 
know  that  he  does  not  understand  his  business.  It  would  be 
unjust  to  Davidson  if  the  present  example  were  offered  as  a 
fair  specimen  of  his  sense  of  the  value  of  authorities  ;  and  if 
he  has  not  produced  better,  it  is  because  there  were  no  better 
to  produce.  If  he  appealed  to  the  early  haeresiologists  his 
cause  would  be  lost;  for,  following  the  lead  of  Justin  Martyr, 
they  commonly  count  Simon  Magus  as  the  parent  of  Gnos 
ticism,*  so  that  if  their  authority  is  to  be  regarded,  the  heresy 
existed  in  Apostolic  times.  Hegesippus,  the  earliest  of  the 
authorities  on  whom  Davidson  relies,  wrote  in  the  Episcopate 
of  Eleutherus,  that  is  to  say,  some  time  between  175  and  189. 
He  is  therefore  more  than  a  century  later  than  the  times  con 
cerning  which  he  is  appealed  to  as  a  witness ;  and  he  is  later 
than  Justin  Martyr,  whose  testimony  I  have  just  quoted  on 
the  other  side.f  But,  strange  to  say,  Davidson  himself  thinks 
(ii.  38)  that  Hegesippus  was  acquainted  with  i  Tim.  vi.  20, 
and  thence  derived  the  expression  '  Gnosis,  falsely  so  called.' 
Hegesippus,  therefore,  must  have  believed  that  Gnosis  existed 
in  the  Apostle's  days.  Thus  it  will  be  seen  that  the  authori 
ties  that  can  be  used  to  fix  the  date  of  the  first  appearance 
of  Gnosticism  are  conflicting  and  untrustworthy;  nor  do  I 


*  See  Irenaeus,  I.  xxiii.  4. 

•j-  The  work  of  Hegesippus  is  lost ;  and  in  this  case  we  have  not  even  an 
extract  from  it,  but  only  the  report  which  Eusebius  gives  (iii.  32),  in  his 
own  words,  of  the  substance  of  what  Hegesippus  had  said.  For  want  of 
the  context  we  cannot  make  a  positive  affirmation  ;  but  it  appears  to  me 
that  when  Hegesippus  says,  that  '  down  to  the  times  of  Trajan  the  Church 
remained  a  pure  and  incorrupt  virgin,'  he  had  specially  in  view  the  Church 
of  Jerusalem  (compare  Euseb.  iv.  22).  The  Elkesaites  were  the  heretics 
with  whom  Hegesippus,  as  a  Christian  of  Palestine,  would  have  most  to 
deal,  and  the  reign  of  Trajan  was  the  very  date  they  claimed  for  the  reve 
lation  of  their  peculiar  doctrines.  They  held  a  kind  of  doctrine  of  develop 
ment,  believing  that  the  latest  growth  of  time  was  the  best,  and  that  the 
full  truth  was  not  to  come  until  error  had  preceded  it.  Until  Paul  had 
promulgated  his  erroneous  doctrines,  the  revelations  of  Elkesai  were  not  to 
be  made.  Hegesippus  gave  a  different  account  of  the  matter.  While  the 
Apostles  were  alive  heresies  were  obliged  to  burrow  in  secret ;  but  when 
their  sacred  choir  had  departed,  and  the  generation  had  passed  away  which 
had  been  vouchsafed  the  hearing  of  their  inspired  wisdom,  then  the 
preachers  of  knowledge,  falsely  so  called,  ventured  to  invade  the  Church, 
as  if  now  bare  and  unprotected. 


XX.]  THE   EPISTLE   TO   THE   EPHESIANS.  423 

believe  that,  even  if  we  had  fuller  information,  it  would  be 
possible  to  name  a  definite  date  for  its  beginning.  For  I 
tike  the  true  history  to  be,  that  there  came  a  wave  of  thought 
from  without,  in  consequence  of  which  certain  ideas  foreign 
to  Christianity  floated  vaguely  about,  meeting  in  different 
quarters  more  or  less  acceptance,  for  some  time  before  any 
one  formed  these  ideas  into  a  system.  With  respect  to  the 
history  of  this  undeveloped  stage  of  Gnosticism,  I  hold  the 
Epistle  to  the  Colossians  to  be  one  of  our  best  sources  of 
information ;  and  those  who  reject  it,  because  it  does  not 
agree  with  their  notions  of  what  the  state  of  speculation  in 
the  first  century  ought  to  be,  are  guilty  of  the  unscientific 
fault  cf  forming  a  theory  on  an  insufficient  induction  of 
facts,  and  then  rejecting  a  fact  which  they  had  not  taken 
into  account,  because  it  does  not  agree  with  their  theory. 

The  Epistle  to  the  Ephesians. — 'Among  the  letters  which 
bear  the  name  of  Paul,'  says  Renan  (Saint  Paul,  xxiiL),  '  the 
Epistle  to  the  Ephesians  is  perhaps  the  one  of  which  there 
are  most  early  quotations,  as  the  composition  of  the  Apostle 
of  the  Gentiles.'  On  internal  grounds  Renan  has  serious 
doubts  as  to  the  Pauline  origin  of  this  Epistle,  and  he  throws 
out  the  idea  that  it  may  have  been  written  under  the  Apostle's 
directions  by  Timothy,  or  some  other  of  his  companions  ;  but 
he  owns  that  the  external  evidence  in  its  favour  is  of  the 
highest  character.  It  is  a  matter  of  course  to  say  that  it  is 
recognized  by  Irenaeus,  Clement  of  Alexandria,  Tertullian, 
and  in  the  Muratorian  Fragment.  The  fact  that  it  was  among 
the  Pauline  Epistles  owned  by  Marcion  makes  it  unnecessary 
to  cite  authorities  later  than  140.  There  is  what  seems  to  me 
a  distinct  use  of  the  Epistle  by  Clement  of  Rome  ;  for  when 
he  exhorts  to  unity  by  the  plea,  '  Have  we  not  one  God,  and 
one  Christ,  and  one  Spirit  of  Grace  poured  out  upon  us,  and 
one  calling  in  Christ  ?'  (c.  46),  I  cannot  think  the  resemblance 
merely  accidental  to  '  one  Spirit,'  '  one  hope  of  your  calling ' 
(Eph.  iv.  4).  There  can  be  no  doubt  of  the  use  of  the  Ephe 
sians  in  what  is  called  the  Second  Epistle  of  Clement ;  but 
though  I  think  this  is  certainly  older  than  the  age  of  Irenaeus, 
I  do  not  know  whether  it  is  older  than  that  of  Marcion.  The 
recognition  of  the  Ephesians  in  the  letter  of  Ignatius  to  the 


424  THE    PAULINE    EPISTLES.  [XX. 

same  Church  is  beyond  doubt.     He  addresses  the  Ephesians 
(c.  12)  as  HavXov  crvfji^vcrTaL,  a  phrase  recalling  Eph.  iii.  3,  4,  9, 
and  goes  on  to  say  how  Paul  makes  mention  of  them  & 
Trda-r]  eVto-ToAfl,  a  puzzling  expression,  which  obliges  us  to  put 
some  force  on  the  grammar,  if  we  translate  '  in  all  his  Epistle/ 
or  on  the  facts,  if  we  translate  '  in   every  Epistle.'      The 
recognition  of  our  Epistle  is  express  in  the  one  case,  pro 
bable  in  the  other.     There  are  other  phrases  in  the  Ignatian 
letters  which  remind  us  of  the  Epistle  to  the  Ephesians,  of 
which  I  only  mention  his  direction  to  Polycarp  (c.  5),  to  ex 
hort  the  brethren  to  love  their  wives,  even  as  the  Lord  the 
Church  (Eph.  v.  25,  29).     Polycarp's  own  letter  refers  (c.  12) 
to  words  of  Scripture,  '  Be  ye  angry,  and  sin  not,'  and  '  Let 
not  the  sun  go  down  on  your  wrath/  the  former  sentence 
being  no  doubt  ultimately  derived  from  Ps.  iv.  5,  but  only 
found  in  connexion  with  the  latter  in  Eph.  iv.  26.     Hermas 
more  than  once  shows  his  knowledge  of  the  text,  '  Grieve  not 
the  Holy  Spirit  of  God'  (iv.  30),  (see  Mandat,  x.  i,  2).    There 
is  another  topic  of  evidence,  the  full  discussion  of  which  will 
come  later  on ;   I  refer  to  the  fact  that  the  First  Epistle  of 
Peter  shows  traces  of  acquaintance  with  the  Pauline  Epistles, 
and  in  particular  with  those  to  the  Romans  and  Ephesians. 
This  fact  is  recognized  by  Renan,  who  is  much  impressed 
with  the  evidence  it  offers  of  the  early  acceptance  of  the 
Epistle  to  the  Ephesians  as  Paul's,  and  as  a  document  of 
authority  (Saint  Paul,  p.  xxii.).      Renan,  being  disposed  to 
accept  Peter's  Epistle,  but  having  doubts  about  that  to  the 
Ephesians,  is  rather  perplexed  by  this  fact,  which  proves  the 
priority  of  the  latter ;  and  he  suggests  that  it  may  have  been 
Peter's  secretary  who  turned  to  account  his  knowledge  of  the 
Epistle  ascribed  to  Paul  (JU Antechrist,  p.  vii.);  but  this  very 
gratuitous  suggestion  does  not  affect  the  inference  as  to  the 
relative  date  of  the  two  Epistles.     Several  critics,  who  do  not 
accept  either  Epistle,  agree  as  to  the  fact  of  a  connexion 
between  them.     If,  as  has  been  already  suggested,  the  Epistle 
to  the  Ephesians  had  the  character  of  an  encyclical,  it  would 
be  natural  that  a  copy  should  be  preserved  for  the  use  of  the 
Church  of  Rome ;  and  we  should  then  have  a  simple  expla 
nation  of  the  fact  that  Peter,  writing  at  Rome,  should  find 


XX.]  THE   EPISTLE   TO   THE    EPHESIANS.  425 

there  in  constant  use  these  two  letters  of  Paul  in  particular — 
that  to  the  Romans  and  to  the  Ephesians. 

What,  then,  are  the  reasons  why  it  is  sought  to  reject  so 
weighty  a  mass  of  external  evidence  ?  You  will,  perhaps,  be 
surprised  to  hear  that  one  of  the  chief  is  the  great  likeness  of 
this  Epistle  to  the  Epistle  to  the  Colossians.  The  fact  of  the 
close  affinity  of  the  two  letters  is  indisputable,*  but  the  ex 
planation  which  Paley  gave  of  it  is  perfectly  satisfactory, 
namely,  that  in  two  letters,  written  about  the  same  time  on 
the  same  subject  by  one  person  to  different  people,  it  is  to 
be  expected  that  the  same  thoughts  will  be  expressed  in 
nearly  the  same  words.  Now  the  Epistle  to  the  Ephesians 
is  specially  tied  to  that  to  the  Colossians  by  the  fact  that 
both  letters  purport  to  have  been  carried  by  the  same  mes 
senger,  Tychicus,  the  paragraph  concerning  whom  is  nearly 
the  same  in  both  (Eph.  vi.  21,  22  ;f  Col.  iv.  7,  8).  That  the 
letters  which  the  Apostle  wrote  to  be  sent  off  by  the  same 
messenger  to  different  Churches  should  be  full  of  the  same 
thoughts,  and  those  thoughts  frequently  expressed  in  the 
same  phrases,  is  so  very  natural,  that  instead  of  the  mutual 
similarity  deserving  to  count  as  an  objection  to  the  genuine 
ness  of  either,  this  correspondence  of  the  character  of  the 
letters,  with  the  traditional  account  of  the  circumstances  of 
their  origin,  ought  to  reckon  as  a  strong  confirmation  of  the 
correctness  of  that  account. 

Yet  this  explanation  of  the  similarity  of  the  two  Epistles 
is  commonly  dismissed  by  sceptical  writers  with  small  consi 
deration.  E)e  Wette,  for  instance,  condemns  the  Epistle  to 
the  Ephesians  as  but  a  'verbose  amplification'  of  the  Epistle 
to  the  Colossians.  He  says,  '  Such  a  transcription  of  himself 
is  unworthy  of  an  Apostle,  and  must  therefore  be  the  work  of 
an  imitator.'  J  The  idea  that  it  is  unworthy  of  an  Apostle  to 
repeat  himself,  springs  from  the  tacit  assumption  that  the  first 

*  'Out  of  the  155  verses  contained  in  the  Epistle  to  the  Ephesians,  78 
contain  expressions  identical  with  those  in  the  Colossian  letter'  (Davidson, 
ii.  200). 

t  From  the  word  'also'  in  Eph.  vi.  21,  Baur  inferred  the  priority  of 
the  Colossian  letter. 

%  In  like  manner,  Renan  (Saint Paul,  xvii.),  'Comment  Paul  a-t-il  pu 
passer  son  temps  a  contrefaire  un  de  ses  ouvrages,  a  se  repeter,  a  faire  une 
lettre  banale  avec  une  lettre  topique  et  particuliere  ?  ' 


THE   PAULINE   EPISTLES.  [XX. 

of  the  two  Epistles  was  a  work  published  for  general  cir 
culation  (though  indeed  it  is  not  uncommon  to  find  authors 
repeating  themselves  even  in  such  published  works) ;  but  I 
am  at  a  loss  to  see  why  an  Apostle  might  not  say  the  same 
things  when  writing  to  different  people.  No  one  finds  any 
difficulty  in  the  supposition  that  an  Apostle  might  write  a 
circular  letter — that  is  to  say,  that  he  might  send  to  different 
Churches  letters  couched  in  identical  words.  What  greater 
impropriety  would  there  be  if,  instead  of  directing  a  scribe  to 
make  a  copy  of  his  first  letter,  he  dictated  a  second  of  like 
tenor  for  the  use  of  a  different  Church  ?  Nor  is  the  case 
much  altered  if,  after  the  second  letter  had  been  written,  he 
found  that  it  added  so  much  to  what  had  been  said  in  the 
first,  as  to  make  him  wish  that  his  disciples  should  read  both 
(Col.  iv.  1 6). 

Those  who  ascribe  the  two  Epistles  to  different  authors 
are  not  agreed  which  was  the  original,  which  the  imitation. 
Mayerhoff,  the  first  assailant  of  the  Epistle  to  the  Colossians, 
made  the  Ephesian  letter  the  earlier,  and  he  has  found  some 
followers.  But  the  more  general,  and  as  I  think  the  more 
plausible,  opinion  reverses  the  order.  Indeed,  the  personal 
details  in  the  Epistle  to  the  Colossians,  and  its  connexion 
with  the  Epistle  to  Philemon,  have  caused  it  to  be  accepted 
as  Pauline  by  some  who  reject  the  Ephesian  letter.  But  what 
I  regard  as  a  complete  refutation  of  the  hypothesis  of  imi 
tation  on  either  side  has  been  made  by  one  of  the  most 
recent  of  German  speculators  on  the  subject — Holtzmann.* 
He  has  made  a  critical  comparison  of  the  parallel  passages 
in  the  two  Epistles,  and  his  result  is,  that  the  contest  as  to 
their  relative  priority  ends  in  a  drawn  battle.  He  gives  as 
examples  seven  passages  in  which  he  pronounces  that  the 
Ephesians  is  the  original,  and  the  Colossians  the  imitation ; 
and  seven  others  in  which  he  comes  to  the  opposite  con 
clusion,  f 

*  Holtzmann,  Professor  of  Theology,  formerly  at  Heidelberg,  now  at 
Strassburg.  His  most  important  work  is  on  the  Synoptic  Gospels.  That 
here  cited  is  Kritik  der  Epheser-und  Kolosserbriefe,  Leipzig,  1872.  He 
has  lately  published  an  Introduction  to  the  New  Testament. 

t  These  are:  Priority  of  Ephesians — Eph.  i.  4  =  Col.  i.  22  ;  Eph.  i. 
6,  7  =  Col.  i.  13,  14 ;  Eph.  iii.  3,  5,  9  =  Col.  i.  26,  ii.  2  ;  Eph.  iii.  17,  18, 


XX.]  THE   EPISTLE   TO   THE   EPHESIANS.  427 

The  natural  conclusion  from  these  facts  would  be  that  the 
similarity  between  the  Epistles  is  not  to  be  explained  by 
conscious  imitation  on  either  side,  but  by  identity  of  author 
ship.*  The  explanation,  however,  which  Holtzmann  offers  is 
that  only  a  certain  nucleus  of  the  Epistle  to  the  Colossians  is 
genuine — that  a  forger  taking  this  for  his  guide,  manufactured 
by  its  means  the  Epistle  to  the  Ephesians ;  and  then,  pleased 
with  his  handiwork,  proceeded  to  interpolate  the  Epistle  to 
the  Colossians  with  pieces  taken  from  his  own  composition. 
And  such  was  the  success  of  this  attempt,  that  not  only  was 
the  forged  Ephesian  Epistle  universally  accepted  as  St.  Paul's, 
but  no  one  cared  to  preserve  the  unimproved  Colossian 
Epistle.  Holtzmann,  expurgating  our  present  Epistle  to  the 
Colossians  by  removing  this  adventitious  matter,  publishes 
what  he  offers  as  the  real  original  Epistle.  The  engineer 
Brindley  declared  that  the  reason  rivers  were  made,  was  to 
feed  navigable  canals.  Some  German  writers  seem  to  think 
that  in  the  ancient  Church  apostolic  documents  were  only 
valued  as  the  possible  basis  of  some  ingenious  forgery.  I 
might  seriously  discuss  this  theory  of  Holtzmann's  if  I  could 
find  that  even  in  his  own  school  he  had  made  a  single  convert 
to  it.f  If  you  study  the  Epistle  in  Lightfoot's  Commentary, 
you  will  find  that  each  of  those  proposed  expurgations  is  a 
real  mutilation  of  the  argument ;  and  the  chief  merit  of  Holtz 
mann's  work  is  his  success  in  showing  that  the  theory  that  the 
Ephesian  Epistle  is  the  work  of  an  imitator  of  the  Colossians 
gives  no  adequate  explanation  of  the  facts. 

iv.  16,  ii.  20  =  Col.  i.  23,  ii.  2,  7 ;  Eph.  iv.  16  =  Col.  ii.  19 ;  Eph.  iv. 
22-24  =  Col.  iii.  9,  10  ;  Eph.  v.  19  =  Col.  iii.  16.  Priority  of  Colossians — 
Col.  i.  i,  2,  =  Eph.  i.  i,  2  ;  Col.  i.  3-9  =  Eph.  i.  15-18 ;  Col.  i.  5  =  Eph. 
i.  3,  12,  13  ;  Col.  i.  25,  29  =  Eph.  iii.  2,  7  ;  Col.  ii.  4-8  =Eph.  iv.  17-21 ; 
€0!.  iv.  5  =  Eph.  v.  15,  16  ;  Col.  iv.  6  =  Eph.  iv.  29. 

*  The  anacolutha  of  the  Epistle  to  the  Ephesians  (compare,  for  instance, 
iii.  I,  iv.  i)  afford  another  proof  that  we  have  here,  not  the  calm  work  of 
an  imitator  of  another  man's  production,  but  the  fervid  utterances  of  an 
•original  writer,  whom  a  rush  of  fresh  thoughts  occasionally  carries  away 
from  what  he  had  been  about  to  say. 

t  Hilgenfeld,  in  his  Journal  for  1873,  reviewing  Holtzmann's  book, 
expresses  his  complete  dissent  from  his  conclusions  ;  and  having  compli 
mented  the  author  on  the  ability  of  his  performance,  winds  up  with  'Aber 
sollen  wir  in  der  Wissenschaft  wirklich  weiter  kommen,  so  haben  wir, 
meine  ich,  objectiver  zu  verfahren.' 


428  THE    PAULINE    EPISTLES.  [XX. 

I  have  said  enough  to  show  that  no  good  reason  for  reject 
ing  the  Epistle  to  the  Ephesians  can  be  drawn  from  its  like 
ness  to  the  sister  Epistle  to  the  Colossians.  But  I  think  that 
the  real  cause  of  hostility  to  this  letter  is  not  this,  but  rather 
the  contradiction  which  it  offers  to  modern  theories  of  early 
Church  history.  According  to  these,  the  feud  between  Paul- 
inists  and  anti-Paulinists  continued  long  into  the  second 
century,  and  it  was  only  at  this  comparatively  late  period  that 
there  arose  the  conception  of  the  '  Catholic  Church'  embracing 
Jew  and  Gentile  on  equal  terms,  and  giving  to  Paul  and  Peter 
equal  honour.  Men  have  refused  to  believe  that  the  book  of 
the  Acts  could  have  been  written  by  a  companion  of  Paul, 
even  ten  or  twenty  years  after  that  Apostle's  death,  because 
they  could  not  think  that  the  conciliatory  school,  to  which 
this  book  clearly  belongs,  could  have  arisen  so  early.  But  if 
we  accept  the  Epistle  to  the  Ephesians,  we  must  own  that  Paul 
was  himself  no  Paulinist,  as  Baur  understands  the  word.  He 
clearly  belongs  to  the  era  of  the  '  Catholic  Church,'  concern 
ing  which  he  has  so  much  to  say  ;  and  he  even  speaks  of  the 
'holy  Apostles'  (iii.  5)  as  might  one  who  had  no  cause  of 
quarrel  with  the  Twelve. 

And  certain  it  is  that  in  this  Epistle  we  read  nothing  of 
St.  Paul's  controversy  with  those  who  '  forbade  him  to  speak 
to  the  Gentiles,  that  they  might  be  saved,'  nothing  of  his  con 
troversy  with  those  who  wished  to  impose  on  Gentile  converts 
the  yoke  of  circumcision.  All  such  controversies  are  clearly 
over  at  the  time  of  writing.  Those  whom  he  addressed, 
though  Gentiles  (iii.  i),  have  won  the  position  of  recognition 
as  '  fellow-citizens  with  the  saints,  and  of  the  household  of 
God'  (ii.  19).  But  is  there  anything  incredible  in  the  sup 
position  that  Paul  himself  lived  to  see  the  dying  out  of  the 
controversy  that  had  once  raged  so  violently  ?  Controversies 
soon  die  out  in  the  face  of  accomplished  facts.  I  have  myself 
seen  many  hot  political  controversies — about  the  first  Reform 
Bill ;  about  the  abolition  of  the  Corn  Laws  ;  about  the  Dis 
establishment  of  the  Irish  Church.  As  long  as  any  practical 
end  could  be  obtained,  the  battle  raged  fiercely  ;  but  when  a 
decision  was  made,  which  there  was  no  hope  of  overturning, 
all  parties  acquiesced  in  the  inevitable,  and  took  no  interest 


XX.]  THE   EPISTLE   TO   THE   EPHESIANS.  429 

in  wrangling  over  the  old  dispute.  So  it  was  with  the  dispute 
as  to  the  obligation  of  Mosaism.  When  emissaries  came 
down  from  Jerusalem,  assuring  Paul's  Gentile  converts  that 
unless  they  were  circumcised  Christ  should  profit  them  no 
thing,  and  when  many  of  these  converts  appeared  ready  to 
give  ear  to  such  teaching,  it  was  natural  that  the  Apostle 
should  protest  loudly  against  a  doctrine  which  subverted  the 
whole  Gospel  he  had  taught.  But  he  counteracted  it  in  even 
a  more  effectual  way  than  direct  opposition.  He  and  his 
disciples  went  on  making  new  converts,  and  founding  new 
Churches  among  the  Gentiles,  on  whom  no  obligation  of 
Judaic  observance  was  laid,  until  it  became  hopeless  for  the 
zealots  for  the  Mosaic  Law  in  Palestine  to  dream  of  excom 
municating  so  large  and  powerful  a  body.  Nine  or  ten  years 
of  Paul's  preaching  were  enough  to  put  the  position  of  the 
Gentile  Churches  beyond  danger  of  assault.  No  one  can 
doubt  that  at  the  time  of  Paul's  Roman  imprisonment  there 
were  Christian  Churches  in  Ephesus  and  other  cities  of  Asia, 
in  Greece,  in  Syria,  in  Rome  itself,  containing  a  multitude  of 
Gentile  converts,  who  did  not  observe  the  law  of  Moses,  and 
who,  nevertheless,  did  not  doubt  that  they  were  entitled  to 
every  privilege  which  union  with  Christ  conferred.  Gentile 
Christianity  was  by  this  time  an  accomplished  fact,  and  it 
shows  inability  to  grasp  the  historic  situation  if  a  man  expects 
Paul's  letters  at  this  date  to  exhibit  him  still  employed  in 
controversial  defence  of  the  position  of  his  Gentile  converts, 
or  if  he  is  surprised  to  find  Paul  taking  for  granted  that  the 
barrier  between  Jew  and  Gentile  had  been  thrown  down.*  It 
is  as  great  an  anachronism  to  expect  to  find  Paul,  at  the  time 
of  his  imprisonment,  maintaining  the  right  of  a  Gentile  to  be 
admitted  into  the  Christian  Church  without  circumcision,  as 

*  Davidson  objects  (ii.  213)  that  Paul's  language  in  this  Epistle  'suits 
an  author  who  knew  the  widespread  fruit  of  the  Gospel  among  Gentiles,  and 
witnessed  its  mighty  effects,  long  after  Paul  had  departed,  but  is  scarcely 
consonant  with  the  perpetual  struggle  carried  on  by  the  Apostle  against  a 
Judaizing  Christianity  upheld  by  Peter,  James,  and  John.'  But  there  is 
evidence  that  Paul  himself  knew  the  widespread  fruit  of  the  Gospel  among 
the  Gentiles,  and  witnessed  its  mighty  effects  ;  and  there  is  no  evidence 
that  his  struggle  against  Judaizing  Christians  was  perpetual,  or  that  Peter, 
James,  and  John,  were  his  opponents  :  unless  we  take  Baur's  word  rather 
than  the  Apostle's  own. 


43°  THE   PAULINE   EPISTLES.  [XX. 

it  would  be  to  expect  to  find  a  statesman  of  the  present  day 
dilating  on  the  right  of  a  Jew  to  be  admitted  into  Parliament 
without  swearing  '  on  the  true  faith  of  a  Christian.' 

But  though  we  can  see  that,  at  the  time  the  Epistle  to  the 
Ephesians  was  written,  there  was  no  need  of  a  struggle  to 
claim  for  Gentiles  admission  on  equal  terms  to  all  the  privi 
leges  of  the  Gospel,  we  can  see  also  that  this  struggle  was 
then  not  long  over.  We  take  it  now  as  a  matter  of  course 
that  we  have  a  full  right  to  every  Christian  privilege,  and  we 
should  be  amazed  if  anyone  denied  our  title  on  the  ground 
that  we  are  not  children  of  Abraham,  or  do  not  observe  the 
Mosaic  Law.  The  writer  of  this  Epistle  asserts  it  as  a  truth 
that  in  Christ  the  distinction  between  Jew  and  Gentile  has 
been  done  away,  and  that  the  Jew  has  no  longer  any  exclusive 
position  of  pre-eminence  ;  but  to  him  this  truth  is  no  matter 
of  course,  but  an  amazing  paradox.  He  is  astonished  as  he 
contemplates  this  '  mystery  of  Christ,'  which  in  other  ages 
was  not  made  known  unto  the  sons  of  men,  '  that  the  Gentiles 
should  be  fellow-heirs  and  of  the  same  body,  and  partakers 
of  his  promise  in  Christ  by  the  Gospel'  (iii.  4).  He  is  thank 
ful  that  to  himself  the  revelation  of  this  mystery  had  been 
made,  and  that  by  the  grace  of  God  he  had  been  employed 
to  publish  it  to  the  world.  Cavils  have  been  raised  both 
against  the  exaggerated  humility  of  *  less  than  the  least  of  all 
saints '  (iii.  8),  which  has  been  taken  for  a  mere  imitation  of 
i  Cor.  xv.  9,  and  against  the  boastfulness  of  iii.  4,  where  the 
language,  it  said,  is  that  of  a  disciple  of  Paul,  who  had  wit 
nessed  the  victory  of  his  principal  in  the  general  recognition 
of  Gentile  Christianity.  But  let  it  be  acknowledged  that  Paul 
lived  to  witness  that  victory  himself,  and  that  at  the  time  he 
wrote  his  Gentile  disciples  were  affected  by  no  stigma  of 
inferiority,  and  is  it  possible  that  he  could  be  exempt  from 
some  human  feelings  of  triumph  at  the  greatness  of  the  revo 
lution  which,  through  his  means,  had  been  brought  about  ? 
That  revolution  he  looked  on  as  indicating  no  change  in 
the  Divine  plans.  It  had  been  God's  eternal  purpose  thus 
through  Christ  to  adopt  the  Gentiles  '  into  his  kingdom;' 
and  it  was  Paul's  great  glory  that  God  should  have  vouch 
safed  to  choose  him,  unworthy  though  he  was,  to  receive  the 


XX.]  THE    EPISTLE   TO   THE    EPHESIANS.  431 

revelation  of  a  mystery  unknown  to  former  ages,  and  to  be 
made  God's  instrument  for  publishing  it  to  the  world.  I  am 
persuaded  that  anyone  who  studies  the  freshness  and  novelty 
with  which  the  doctrine  of  the  non-exclusive  character  of 
Christianity  is  regarded  in  the  Epistle  to  the  Ephesians,  will 
feel  that  this  is  a  document  which  cannot  be  pushed  down  to 
the  second  century.* 

It  has  been  objected  that  Paul  could  never  have  directed 
the  Colossian  Church  to  procure  what  was  but  a  diffuse  and 
vapid  copy  of  the  letter  addressed  to  themselves.  Let  me 
point  out  that  though  the  two  letters  deal  with  the  same 
themes,  one  who  had  read  either  would  find  in  the  other  a 
varied  presentation  of  doctrine.  In  the  Colossian  Epistle  the 
dignity  of  the  Head  of  the  Church  is  set  forth  with  a  fulness 
greater  than  in  any  other  Pauline  Epistle ;  in  this  Epistle  the 
dignity  of  the  Church  itself  has  been  exhibited.  We  are  so 
familiar  with  the  idea  of  the  Catholic  Church,  that  we  cannot 
easily  conceive  how  great  an  impression  must  have  been 
made  by  the  wonderful  unlikeness  of  the  Christian  organi 
zation  to  anything  the  world  had  previously  witnessed.  In 
every  great  town  throughout  the  empire  there  was  now  a 
community  in  which  equality  was  the  rule,  and  all  the  dis 
tinctions  which  had  kept  men  apart  counted  for  nothing. 
Jew  and  Gentile,  Greek  and  Barbarian,  were  united  in  mutual 
love  ;  the  slave  and  the  freeman  had  like  privileges,  male  and 
female  were  on  equal  terms.  There  was  no  exclusiveness  ; 
any  who  desired  to  join  was  welcome.  And  all  these  several 
communities  were  but  parts  of  one  wider  organization.  Dis 
tance  of  place  counted  as  little  as  difference  of  social  condition. 
All  were  brethren  in  a  common  faith :  eager  to  do  good  offices 
to  each  other  because  bound  by  love  to  a  common  Lord,  whose 
glorious  reappearing  was  the  common  hope  of  all.  The  Chris 
tian  Church  impressed  the  imaginations  of  men,  whose  own 
claim  to  belong  to  it  was  not  admitted.  According  to  Valen- 
tinus  the  Church  on  earth  was  but  the  visible  presentation  of 
a  heavenly  Aeon  which  had  existed  before  all  time.  And  in 

*  I  have  noted  (p.  31)  the  Pauline  trait  that  the  writer  (ii.  ir)  feels  it 
an  affront  that  the  name  '  uacircumcised'  should  be  applied  to  his  Gentile 

disciples. 


43 2  THE   PAULINE   EPISTLES.  [XX. 

this  Valentinus  agreed  with  what  I  count  to  be  older  heresies 
(Iren.  i.  xxx.  i,  Hippol.  v.  6).  Let  no  one  say  that  it  needed 
a  century  before  such  a  phenomenon  as  this  could  arrest  the 
attention  or  impress  the  imagination  of  men.  The  pheno 
menon  existed  in  Paul's  time.  The  unity  of  the  Church  was 
manifested  when  so  many  congregations  of  his  converts  made 
collections  for  the  poor  saints  at  Jerusalem  ;  when  his  dis 
ciples  sent  money  for  his  own  support  to  distant  cities ;  when 
as  he  drew  near  to  Rome  brethren  came  as  far  as  Appii 
Forum  to  meet  him.  His  remaining  letters  (and  he  probably 
wrote  many  more)  testify  how  many  different  communities 
claimed  his  care.  Paul's  earlier  Epistles,  especially  those  to 
the  Corinthians,  show  that  his  mind  had  dwelt  on  the  fact  that 
Christians  formed  an  organized  body,  which  he  describes  as 
the  temple  of  the  living  God  ;  as  a  body  of  which  each  par 
ticular  saint  was  a  member,  Christ  the  head.  These  figures 
are  repeated  in  the  Epistle  to  the  Ephesians  (i.  23,  ii.  20,  iii.  6, 
iv.  1 6,  25),  but  he  adds  a  new  one.*  The  closest  tie  of  earthly 
love  is  used  to  illustrate  the  love  of  Christ  for  His  Church  ; 
and  then,  by  a  wonderful  reflection  of  the  illustration,  the 
love  of  Christ  for  His  Church  is  made  to  sanctify  and  glorify 
Christian  marriage,  husbands  being  exhorted  to  love  their 
wives,  even  as  Christ  the  Church. 

You  will  find  some  critics  using  very  disparaging  terms  as 
to  the  literary  excellence  of  the  Epistle  to  the  Ephesians. 
Questions  of  taste  cannot  be  settled  by  disputation,  but  a 
critic  may  well  distrust  his  own  judgment  if  he  can  see  no 
merit  in  a  book  which  has  had  a  great  success  ;  and  I  do  not 
think  that  there  is  any  N.  T.  book  which  we  can  prove  to  have 
been  earlier  circulated  than  this,  or  more  widely  esteemed. 
At  the  present  day  there  is  no  more  popular  hymn  than  thatf 
which  but  turns  into  verse  the  words  of  this  Epistle ;  and 
holding  the  opinion  I  have  already  expressed  as  to  the  proba 
bility  of  the  Apostle  John's  having  visited  Rome,  I  cannot  but 
think  that  when  he  beheld  in  apocalyptic  vision  the  '  new 
Jerusalem  coming  down  from  God  out  of  heaven,  prepared  as 
a  bride  adorned  for  her  husband '  (Rev.  xxi.  2  ;  see  also  xix.  7  ; 

*  Yet  see  2  Cor.  xi.  2  ;  and  Is.  liv.  5,  Ixi.  10 ;  Jer.  iii.  14. 
t  '  The  Church's  one  Foundation.' 


XX.]  THE    PASTORAL   EPISTLES.  433 

xxi.  9  ;  xxii.  17),  he  only  saw  the  embodiment  of  a  concep 
tion  familiar  to  him  from  his  knowledge  of  an  Epistle  highly 
valued  by  the  Roman  Church.*  I  very  strongly  believe  that 
it  was  the  language  (Eph.  i.  4)  about  the  election  of  the  Church 
before  the  foundation  of  the  world  which  was  the  source  not 
only  of  the  Ophite  and  Valentinian  conceptions  to  which  I 
have  just  referred,  but  also  of  the  language  employed  by  early 
orthodox  writers.  Hermas  (Vis.  ii.  4)  speaks  of  the  Church 
as  created  before  all  things,  and  of  the  world  as  formed  for 
her  sake  ;  and  the  so-called  second  Epistle  of  Clement  of 
Rome  (c.  14)  speaks  of  the  spiritual  Church  as  created  before 
the  sun  and  moon,  as  pre-existent  like  Christ  Himself,  and 
like  Him  manifested  in  the  last  days  for  man's  salvation.  It 
is  idle  to  discuss  the  literary  excellence  of  the  Epistle  to  the 
Ephesians,  if  I  am  right  in  thinking  that  it  has  had  so  great 
influence  on  Christian  thought. 

IV.  The  Pastoral  Epistles. — I  now  come  to  the  group  of 
Pauline  Epistles  against  which  the  charge  of  spuriousness 
has  been  made  most  confidently.  Renan,  who  does  not 
venture  positively  to  condemn  any  of  the  others,  and  who  has 
only  serious  doubts  about  the  Epistle  to  the  Ephesians,  seems 
to  have  thought  that  his  reputation  for  orthodoxy  in  his  own 
school  would  be  seriously  compromised  if  he  showed  any 
hesitation  in  rejecting  the  Pastoral  Epistles  ;  and,  accordingly, 
*  apocryphal,'  'fabricated,'  'forged,'  are  the  epithets  which  he 
commonly  applies  to  them.  Yet,  not  very  consistently,  he 
constantly  uses  them  as  authorities  for  his  narrative.f  Yet  it 

*  According  to  modern  sceptical  writers  the  author  of  the  Apocalypse 
was  an  enemy  and  a  libeller  of  St.  Paul ;  but  the  real  St.  John  read  and 
valued  St.  Paul's  writings.  For  if  the  Epistle  to  the  Colossians  be  really 
Paul's,  it  scarcely  needs  the  quotation  of  particular  phrases  to  show  that 
the  Christology  of  that  Epistle  is  reproduced  in  the  Apocalypse ;  but  we 
have  the  very  phrases  irp<aT6roKos  e/c  TWV  vtnptav  (Col.  i.  1 8)  in  Rev.  i.  5, 
and  the  a.px'n  °f  tne  same  verse,  with  irpcardTOKos  Traces  /CTiVewy  (Col.  i. 
15),  in  %  apxv  TTJS  Kriffecas  TOV  0eoC  (Rev.  iii.  14).  The  writing  of  the 
names  of  the  Apostles  on  the  foundations  of  the  heavenly  city  (Rev.  xxi. 
14)  had  been  anticipated  in  Eph.  iii.  20  ;  and  there  is  a  close  resemblance 
between  Eph.  iii.  5,  and  Rev.  x.  7.  There  are  very  many  other  verbal 
coincidences  which  quite  fall  in  with  the  supposition  of  St.  John's  acquaint 
ance  with  the  Epistle  to  the  Ephesians,  though  they  would  not  suffice  to 
prove  it. 

t  See  Saint  Paul,  124,  132,  419,  439,  but  especially  DAntechrist,  pp. 
100,  101,  which  are  altogether  founded  on  these  Epistles.  At  p.  103  he 

2  F 


434  THE   PAULINE   EPISTLES.  [XX. 

is  certainly  for  no  deficiency  of  external  attestation  that  these 
Epistles  are  to  be  rejected.  Irenaeus,  Clement,  Tertullian, 
the  Muratorian  Fragment,  Theophilus  of  Antioch,  the  Epistle 
of  the  Churches  of  Vienne  and  Lyons,  unquestionably  re 
cognize  them.  Polycarp,  at  the  very  beginning  of  the  second 
century,  uses  then  largely,  and  there  are  what  I  count  distinct 
echoes  of  the  letters  in  Clement  of  Rome,*  and  in  Justin 
Martyr.  I  must  speak  in  a  little  more  detail  about  Hege- 
sippus. 

Baur  has  given  students  of  early  Church  History  so  many 
new  ideas,  that  they  would  have  great  cause  to  be  grate 
ful  to  him,  if  it  were  not  that  these  ideas  are  for  the  most 
part  wrong.  I  admire  the  ingenuity  of  Baur,  as  I  admire 
the  genius  of  Victor  Hugo.  But  I  think  L '  Homme  qui  rit 
gives  as  accurate  a  representation  of  English  History  in 
the  reign  of  James  II.  as  Baur  does  of  the  early  Christian 
Church.  I  do  not  know  any  of  Baur's  suggestions  wilder 
than  that  about  Hegesippus  and  the  Pastoral  Epistles.  I 
have  already  (see  p.  422)  referred  to  a  place  in  which  Eusebius 
in  his  own  words  gives  the  sense  of  a  passage  in  Hegesippus 
employing  there  the  words,  '  knowledge,  falsely  so  called.' 
Baur  thinks  that  Eusebius  found  these  words  in  Hegesippus; 
and  though  this  cannot  be  proved,  I  think  it  very  likely ;  for 
we  constantly  find  that  where  Eusebius,  instead  of  transcrib 
ing  a  passage,  gives  a  summary  of  it,  he  is  apt,  as  is  very 
natural,  to  incorporate  many  of  his  author's  words.  It  seems 
likely,  then,  that  Hegesippus  is  to  be  added  to  the  number  of 
those  who  use  the  Pastoral  Epistles.  But  instead  of  drawing 
this  conclusion,  Baur  infers  that  the  Pastoral  Epistles  use 
Hegesippus ;  a  frightful  anachronism,  in  which  few  of  his 
disciples  at  the  present  day  venture  to  follow  him ;  because, 
whether  the  Pastoral  Epistles  be  Paul's  or  not,  both  external 


feels  the  necessity  of  making  an  apology,  and  says,  « Nous  usons  de  cette 
epitre  comme  d'une  sorte  de  roman  historique,  fait  avec  un  sentiment 
tres-justede  la  situation  de  Paul  en  ses  derniers  temps.'  There  could  not 
be  clearer  testimony  from  an  unwilling  witness  to  the  internal  marks  of 
truth  presented  by  the  Epistle  which  he  cites. 

*  In  addition  to  several  in  the  previously  known  portions,  see  the  newly 
recovered  chapter  Ixi.,  in  particular  the  phrase  6  flouriAeus  ruv  alwvuv  (i 
Tim.  i.  17). 


XX.]  THE    PASTORAL   EPISTLES.  435 

and  internal  evidence  forbid  our  ascribing  to  them  so  late  a 
date  as  the  end  of  the  second  century.  Baur  has  no  better 
reason  for  his  opinion  than  that  Hegesippus,  being  an  anti- 
Pauline  Ebionite,  could  not  quote  St.  Paul.  But  for  so  de 
scribing  Hegesippus  there  is  no  evidence.  He  was  a  native 
of  Palestine,  no  doubt ;  but  Eusebius,  who  was  certainly  no 
Ebionite,  has  no  suspicion  of  his  orthodoxy.  Hegesippus 
approved  of  the  Epistle  of  the  Roman  Clement,  which  has  a 
strong  Pauline  colouring,  and  he  was  in  full  communion  both 
with  the  Church  of  Rome  and  with  other  leading  Churches  of 
his  time. 

The  only  set-off  to  be  made  against  the  proof  of  the  univer 
sal  reception  of  the  Pastoral  Epistles  by  orthodox  Christians 
is  the  fact  of  their  rejection  by  some  heretics.  For  the  other 
Pauline  Epistles  we  have  the  testimony  of  Marcion  ;  but  these 
three  were  not  included  in  his  Canon.  We  hear  also  of  Basi- 
lides  having  rejected  them.  Clement  of  Alexandria  (Strom. 
ii.  u)  attributes  this  rejection  solely  to  doctrinal  dislike, 
naming  in  particular  the  verse  about  i^evSwvu/zos  yvaxrts,  just 
referred  to,  as  the  cause  of  offence.  St.  Jerome,  in  the  preface 
to  his  Commentary  on  Titus,  also  complains  of  the  arbitrary 
conduct  of  these  heretics  in  rejecting  Epistles  which  they  did 
not  like,  without  being  able  to  produce  good  reasons  to  justify 
their  rejection  ;  and  he  says  that  Tatian,  though  he  rejected 
some  of  Paul's  Epistles,  yet  accepted  that  to  Titus  with  par 
ticular  cordiality.  From  this  it  has  been  commonly  imagined 
that  the  Epistles  which  Tatian  rejected  were  those  to  Timothy. 
There  is  no  evidence  to  prove  this,  but  the  thing  is  likely 
enough.  At  least  the  First  Epistle  to  Timothy  contains 
matter  offensive  to  an  Encratite,  in  its  condemnation  of  those 
who  forbade  to  marry  and  commanded  to  abstain  from  meat, 
and  in  its  advice  to  Timothy  to  drink  a  little  wine  for  his 
stomach's  sake.  Yet  the  First  Epistle  to  Timothy  and  that 
to  Titus  so  clearly  stand  or  fall  together,  that  to  accept  the  one 
and  reject  the  other  is  a  decision  which  commands  no  respect. 
The  same  traits  which  would  make  an  Epistle  disliked  by 
Tatian  would  make  it  also  disliked  by  Marcion,  who  shared 
his  Encratite  principles  ;  and  Marcion  was  so  very  arbitrary 
in  his  dealings  with  the  Gospels,  that  his  rejection  of  Epistles 

2  F  2 


436  THE    PAULINE   EPISTLES.  [XX. 

does  not  count  for  much,  especially  when  these  Epistles  have 
the  earlier  attestation  of  Polycarp. 

If,  therefore,  the  battle  had  to  be  fought  solely  on  the 
ground  of  external  evidence,  the  Pastoral  Epistles  would 
obtain  a  complete  victory.  The  objections  to  these  Epistles 
on  the  grounds  of  internal  evidence  may  be  classed  under 
three  heads  ;  and  the  facts  on  which  these  objections  are 
founded  must  be  conceded,  though  we  dispute  the  inferences 
drawn  from  them.* 

(1)  There  are   peculiarities  of  diction  which  unite  these 
Epistles   to  each  other,  and  separate  them  from  the  other 
Pauline  letters.     For  instance,  all  three  open  with  the  saluta 
tion,  '  Grace,  mercy,  and  peace  ;'  in  the  other  Pauline  letters 
it  is  *  Grace  and  peace.'     The  phrase  '  sound  doctrine'  8180.0-- 
/caXtia   vyiatVovo-a,    and  other  derivatives   from  vyfys   in  this 
metaphorical  sense,  are  to  be  found  repeatedly  in  the  Pastoral 
Epistles,  and  not  elsewhere.    So,  likewise,  the  word  euo-e/taa, 
and  the  phrase,  '  this  is  a  faithful  saying.'    The  master  of  a 
slave  is  called  Seo-Tror^g  in  these  Epistles,  Kvpios  in  the  others. 
The  appearance  of  our  Lord  at  His  second  coming  is  e7ri<£cu>eta, 
not  Trapovo-ia,  as  in  the  earlier  Epistles.     Several  other  ex 
amples  of  the  same  kind  might  be  given,  but  these  are  enough 
to  illustrate  the  nature  of  the  argument.    The  inference  which 
sceptical  writers  draw  from  it  is,  that  these  three  Epistles 
have  a  common  author,  and  that  author  not  St.  Paul. 

(2)  The  second  topic  is,  that  the  nature  of  the  controver 
sies  with  which  the  writer  has  to  deal,  and  the  opponents 
whom  he  has  to  encounter,  are  different  from  those  dealt  with 
in  Paul's  other  Epistles.     The  writer  does  not  insist  on  the 
worthlessness  of  circumcision  and  other  Mosaic  rites,  on  the 
importance  of  faith,  or  on  the  doctrine  of  justification  without 
the  deeds  of  the  law.     On  the  other  hand,  he  insists  more 
sharply  than  in  the  other  Epistles  on  the  necessity  of  good 
works.      For  the  false  teachers  whom  he  had  in  view  appear 
to  have  prided  themselves  on  their  knowledge,  and  the  word 
Gnosis  seems  to  have  then  already  acquired  a  technical  sense. 
But  this  boasted  knowledge  consisted  merely  in  acquaintance 

*  In  what  follows  I  repeat  several  things  which  I  said  in  an  article  on 
the  Pastoral  Epistles  in  the  Christian  Observer  for  1877. 


XX.]  THE   PASTORAL   EPISTLES.  437 

with  unprofitable  speculations  about  endless  genealogies, 
which  only  ministered  questions ;  while  they  who  possessed 
it  neglected  the  practical  side  of  religion,  confessing  God 
with  their  mouths,  but  in  works  denying  Him, '  being  abomi 
nable  and  disobedient,  and  unto  every  good  work  reprobate.' 
In  opposition  to  such  teaching,  the  writer  insists  sharply  on 
the  necessity  that  those  who  have  believed  in  God  should  be 
careful  to  maintain  good  works,  should  avoid  foolish  and 
unlearned  questions  and  genealogies,  and  contentions  and 
strivings  about  the  law,  inasmuch  as  these  are  unprofitable 
and  vain.  The  false  teaching  combated  seems  to  differ  a 
good  deal  in  complexion  from  that  opposed  in  the  Epistle  to 
the  Colossians,  and  to  have  a  more  Jewish  cast  (Titus  i.  14). 
It  has  also  been  contended  that  the  directions  to  Christian 
ministers  in  I  Tim.  and  Titus  imply  a  more  developed  hier 
archical  system  than  do  Paul's  acknowledged  letters.  These 
common  characteristics  of  the  Pastoral  Epistles  lead  us  to 
believe  that  they  were  written  at  a  later  time  than  Paul's 
other  Epistles,  and  when  the  perils  of  the  Church  were  dif 
ferent.  The  use,  concerning  the  false  teachers,  of  the  word 
heretic  (Titus  iii.  10),  has  also  been  noted  as  a  sign  of 
lateness  ;  but  it  must  be  remembered  that  '  heresies '  are 
enumerated  among  the  works  of  the  flesh  (Gal.  v.  20). 

(3)  There  is  great  difficulty  in  harmonizing  these  Epistles 
with  the  history  in  the  Acts.  The  Epistle  to  Titus  implies  a 
voyage  of  Paul  to  Crete  ;  the  First  Epistle  to  Timothy  implies 
other  travels  of  Paul,  for  which  we  cannot  easily  find  room  in 
Luke's  history.  Take,  in  particular,  the  Second  Epistle.  This 
was  written  from  an  imprisonment  in  Rome  ;  for  we  are  told 
(i.  17)  how  Onesiphorus,  when  in  Rome,  searched  diligently 
for  the  Apostle,  and  found  him.  And  on  his  way  to  Rome 
we  are  told  (iv.  20)  that  the  Apostle  left  Trophimus  at  Miletus, 
sick.  Now,  when  Paul  was  last  at  Miletus,  on  his  way  to 
Jerusalem,  he  did  not  leave  Trophimus  there  ;  for  we  find 
that  Trophimus  accompanied  Paul  to  Jerusalem,  and  that 
one  of  the  causes  why  the  Jews  .of  Asia  set  on  Paul  in  the 
Temple  was  that  they  had  seen  this  Trophimus  with  him  in 
the  city,  and  supposed  that  the  Apostle  had  brought  him  into 
the  Temple  (Acts  xxi.  29).  St.  Paul's  voyage  from  Caesarea 


438  THE    PAULINE    EPISTLES.  [XX. 

to  Rome  is  carefully  traced  by  St.  Luke,  and  we  find  that  he 
did  not  touch  at  Miletus  on  his  way.  I  will  not  trouble  you 
with  some  far-fetched  attempts  to  reconcile  this  statement 
about  Trophimus  with  the  supposition  that  the  imprisonment 
from  which  the  Second  Epistle  to  Timothy  was  written  is  the 
same  as  that  recorded  by  St.  Luke.  In  my  judgment  these 
explanations  utterly  fail.  Further,  we  are  told  in  the  verse 
just  referred  to  that  *  Erastus  abode  in  Corinth;'  and  the 
most  natural  explanation  of  this  is  that  Paul  had  left  him 
there ;  but  we  find  from  the  Acts  that  the  Apostle  had  not 
been  in  Corinth  for  some  years  before  his  Roman  imprison 
ment,  and  Timothy  had  been  with  Paul  since  his  last  visit  to 
Corinth,  so  that  there  was  no  occasion  to  inform  him  by  letter 
about  it.  Once  more,  the  verse  about  the  cloak,  or,  as  some 
translate  it,  the  case  for  books,  that  Paul  left  at  Troas  (a 
verse,  I  may  say  in  passing,  which  no  forger  would  ever 
dream  of  inserting),  would  imply  that  Paul  had  been  at  Troas 
within  some  moderate  time  of  the  epoch  when  the  Apostle 
was  writing,  for  it  is  hardly  likely  he  would  have  left  articles 
on  which  he  seems  to  have  set  much  value  to  lie  uncalled  for 
at  Troas  for  many  years.  But  the  last  visit  to  Troas  recorded 
in  the  Acts  is  distant  some  seven  or  eight  years  from  the 
date  of  the  Roman  imprisonment.  Other  proofs  of  the  same 
kind  could  be  multiplied. 

Now,  of  these  three  difficulties,  the  first,  arising  from 
peculiarities  of  diction,  is  one  which  we  have  already  learned 
to  disregard.  The  Epistles  which  I  have  previously  examined 
exhibit  in  Paul's  writings  very  great  varieties  of  expression, 
showing  him  to  be  a  man  of  considerable  mental  pliability, 
and  not  one  whose  stock  of  phrases  would  be  likely  to  be 
stereotyped  when  he  came  to  write  these  letters.  But  I  wil 
lingly  concede  that  the  argument  from  the  diction  makes  it 
likely  that  the  Pastoral  Epistles  were  written  at  no  great  dis 
tance  of  time  from  each  other,  and  probably  at  some  distance 
of  time  from  the  other  Epistles.  For  in  Paul's  Epistles  we 
find  great  likeness  of  expression  between  Epistles  written  at 
nearly  the  same  time — as,  for  instance,  between  the  Romans 
and  Galatians — between  the  Ephesians  and  Colossians,  while 
the  different  groups  of  Epistles  differ  considerably  in  words 


XX.]  THE    PASTORAL    EPISTLES.  439 

and  topics  from  each  other.  This  is  what  we  find  on  examin 
ing  the  different  works  of  any  author  who  has  written  much, 
viz.  considerable  resemblance  in  style  between  works  of  the 
san.e  period  ;  but  often  modifications  of  style  as  he  advances 
in  life.  Now,  though  each  group  of  Paul's  Epistles  has  its 
peculiarities  of  diction,  there  are  links  of  connexion  between 
the  phraseology  of  each  group  and  that  of  the  next  in  order 
of  tims  ;  and  there  are  such  links  between  that  of  the  Pastoral 
Epistles  and  of  the  letters  of  the  imprisonment.  Thus  the 
Pastoral  Epistles  are  said  to  be  un-Pauline,  because  they  call 
the  enemy  of  mankind  '  the  devil/  and  not  '  Satan/  as  Paul 
does.  But  the  name  '  the  devil '  occurs  twice  in  Ephesians 
(iv.  27,  vi.  u).  The  name  eTrt^avcia,  applied  to  our  Lord's 
second  coming,  is  said  to  be  un-Pauline  ;  but  is  found  in 
2  Thess.  ii.  8  (see  also  the  <£ai/epow  of  Col.  iii.  4).  The  OIKO- 
vo/xt'a  of  the  Ephesian  Epistle  (i.  10,  ii.  2,  9)  reappears  in  the 
most  approved  reading  of  i  Tim.  i.  4.  The  co-ordination  of 
love  and  faith,  in  Eph.  vi.  23,  is  said  by  Davidson  (ii.  214)  to 
be  un-Pauline,  but  to  be  found  also  in  i  Timothy.  And  so 
it  certainly  is  (i.  14,  iv.  12,  vi.  u;  2  Tim.  i.  13,  ii.  22);  but  I 
should  not  have  dreamed  of  building  an  argument  on  what 
seems  to  me  one  of  the  most  common  of  Pauline  combi 
nations  ;  for  instance,  '  the  breastplate  of  faith  and  love ' 
(i  Thess.  v.  8).  The  stress  laid  in  the  Pastoral  Epistles  on 
coming  to  '  the  knowledge  of  the  truth/  cts  liri-yvwriv  dXij&ia? 
(i  Tim.  ii.  4;  2  Tim.  ii.  25,  iii. 7  ;  Tit.  i.  i)  has  been  imagined 
to  indicate  a  time  after  Gnostic  ideas  as  to  the  importance  of 
knowledge  had  become  prevalent ;  but  the  term  eTrtyi/wo-is  is 
frequent  in  Paul's  Epistles  (see  in  particular  Eph.  iv.  13  ; 
Col.i.  9, 10,  ii.2,iii.  10).  Dr. Gwynn  (Speaker's  Commentary  'On 
Philippians/  p.  588)  has  noted  several  coincidences  between 
2  Tim.  iv.  6-8,  and  Philippians;  in  particular,  the  use  of  the 
three  words  cnrcvSofjuu,  di/aAvo-is,  dywv,  the  first  two  words 
being  in  the  N.  T.  peculiar  to  these  two  Epistles,  and  the  third 
being  also  in  the  N.  T.  a  rare  and  exclusively  Pauline  word. 
On  the  whole,  there  is  nothing  in  the  diction  of  these  Epistles 
which  is  not  explained  by  the  supposition  that  these  three  are 
the  latest  of  St.  Paul's  Epistles,  and  that  they  were  written  at 
no  great  distance  of  time  from  each  other. 


44°  THE    PAULINE    EPISTLES.  [XX. 

We  are  led  to  the  same  conclusion  on  trying  to  harmonize 
these  Epistles  with  the  Acts.  I  have  already  mentioned  the 
difficulties  attending  the  supposition  that  the  Second  to 
Timothy  was  written  from  the  imprisonment  recorded  in  che 
Acts.  The  other  two  Epistles  present  equal  difficulties.  The 
First  to  Timothy  intimates  that  Paul  had  been  in  Ephesus  not 
long  before  ;  for  it  begins  by  saying,  'As  I  besought  thee  to 
abide  still  at  Ephesus,  when  I  went  into  Macedonia.'  But  on 
Paul's  first  visit  to  Ephesus  mentioned  in  the  Acts,  he  left  it, 
not  for  Macedonia  but  for  Jerusalem.  On  his  second  visit  he 
did  leave  it  for  Macedonia  ;  but  instead  of  leaving  Timothy 
behind,  he  sent  him  on  before.  It  has  been  said  that  Paul's 
three  years  spent  at  Ephesus  did  not  exclude  occasional  ab 
sences,  and  that  in  one  of  these  he  had  gone  to  Macedonia— 
a  journey  imagined  for  the  sake  of  this  Epistle.  Yet  the  whole 
tone  of  the  Epistle  implies  that  it  was  not  written  during  a 
temporary  absence,  but  that  Timothy  had  been  left  in  charge 
of  the  Church  at  Ephesus  for  a  considerable  time.  When, 
further,  it  is  proposed  to  take  out  of  Paul's  three  years  at 
Ephesus  time  for  a  journey  to  Crete,  in  which  to  leave  Titus 
there,  and  a  winter  at  Nicopolis  spoken  of  in  that  Epistle,  so 
large  a  gap  is  made  in  the  three  years  at  Ephesus  that  Luke's 
silence  becomes  inexplicable.  Renan  spends  some  twenty 
pages  in  proving  satisfactorily  enough  the  failure  of  all  exist 
ing  attempts  to  find  a  place  for  these  Epistles  in  the  period 
of  Paul's  life  embraced  by  the  Acts ;  but  he  passes  over 
almost  in  silence  the  solution  which  removes  every  difficulty : 
that  Paul  was  released  from  his  Roman  imprisonment,  that  he 
afterwards  made  other  journeys,  and  wrote  the  Epistle  to  Titus 
and  the  First  to  Timothy,  and  was  then  imprisoned  a  second 
time,  and  wrote  the  Second  Epistle  to  Timothy.  The  distance 
of  time  which,  according  to  this  solution,  separates  these 
Epistles  from  the  rest,  at  once  accounts  for  the  peculiarities 
on  which  I  have  already  commented. 

What  is  said  in  answer  to  this  is,  that  Paul's  release  from 
his  Roman  imprisonment  is  unhistorical — that  it  is  a  mere 
hypothesis  invented  to  get  rid  of  a  difficulty.  But  this  answer 
exhibits  a  complete  misconception  of  the  logical  position  ; 
for  it  is  really  those  who  refuse  to  entertain  the  idea  of  Paul's 


XX.]  THE   PASTORAL   EPISTLES.  441 

release  who  make  an  unwarrantable  hypothesis.  Paul's  re 
lease  from  his  Roman  imprisonment,  we  are  told,  is  unhis- 
torical:  so  is  his  non-release.  In  other  words,  Luke's  history 
of  the  life  of  Paul  breaks  off  without  telling  us  whether  he 
was  released  or  not.  Under  these  circumstances  a  scientific 
inquirer  ought  to  hold  his  mind  unbiassed  towards  either  sup 
position.  If  new  evidence  presents  itself,  no  good  reason 
either  for  accepting  or  rejecting  it  can  be  furnished  by  any 
preconceived  opinion  as  to  the  issue  of  Paul's  imprisonment. 
Now  the  Pastoral  Epistles  are  a  new  source  of  evidence. 
They  come  to  us  with  the  best  possible  external  attestation ; 
and  our  opponents  will  not  dispute  that  if  we  accept  them  as 
Pauline,  they  lead  us  to  the  conclusion  that  Paul  lived  to 
make  other  journeys  than  those  recorded  by  St.  Luke.  We 
accept  this  conclusion,  not  because  of  any  preconceived  hypo 
thesis,  but  because  on  other  grounds  we  hold  the  Epistles  to 
be  genuine.  But  it  is  those  who  say,  '  we  cannot  believe  these 
Epistles  to  be  Paul's,  because  they  indicate  a  release  from  his 
imprisonment  which  we  know  did  not  take  place,'  who  really 
make  an  unwarrantable  assumption. 

I  am  compelled  to  elaborate  a  point  which  seems  to  me 
too  plain  to  need  much  argument,  by  the  confidence  with 
which  a  whole  host  of  Rationalist  critics  assume  that  the 
Pastoral  Epistles  can  only  be  received  on  condition  of  our 
being  able  to  find  a  place  for  them  within  the  limits  of  the 
history  recorded  in  the  Acts.  Reuss,  for  instance,  who  gives 
a  candid  reception  to  the  claims  of  the  Second  Epistle  to 
Timothy,  for  which  he  thinks  he  can  find  a  place  within  these 
limits,  rejects  the  First  Epistle  and  that  to  Titus,  because  he 
cannot  force  them  in.  Let  us  take,  then,  the  argument  about 
the  Epistle  to  Titus,  and  it  will  be  seen  whether  it  is  the 
acceptors  or  the  rejectors  of  that  Epistle  who  make  an  un 
proved  hypothesis.  We  accept  the  Epistle  because  of  the 
good  external  evidence  on  which  it  comes ;  and  we  then  draw 
the  inference,  Paul  at  some  time  visited  Crete.  Not  that  we 
had  had  any  previous  theory  on  the  subject,  but  solely  because 
this  Epistle — which  we  consider  we  have  good  reason  to  regard 
as  Paul's — states  that  he  did.  Nay,  reply  our  opponents,  the 
Epistle  cannot  be  Paul's,  because  he  never  visited  Crete.  '  How 


442  THE   PAULINE    EPISTLES.  [XX. 

do  you  know  he  did  not  ?'  '  Because  we  have  in  the  Acts  of  the 
Apostles  a  full  history  of  the  Apostle's  life,  which  leaves  no 
room  for  such  a  visit.'  '  Well,  we  are  pleased  to  see  you 
attribute  such  value  to  the  Acts  of  the  Apostles,  as  a  record 
of  Paul's  life  not  only  accurate  but  complete.  But  the  history 
of  the  Acts  breaks  off  at  the  year  63.  May  not  Paul  have 
visited  Crete  later  ?'  '  No;  he  could  not  have  done  so,  for  he 
never  was  released  from  his  Roman  imprisonment.'  '  But 
how  do  you  know  he  was  not  ?' 

Which  of  us  now  is  making  an  unproved  assumption  ? 

If  we  were  arguing  against  a  disciple  of  Darwin,  and  if  we 
contended  that  the  Darwinian  theory  could  not  be  true  be-, 
cause  the  six  thousand  years  for  which  the  world  has  lasted 
does  not  afford  room  for  the  changes  of  species  which  that 
theory  asserts,  would  he  not  have  a  right  to  call  on  us  for 
proof  that  the  world  has  only  lasted  so  long  ?  Might  he  not 
smile  at  us  if  we  declared  that  it  was  he  who  was  making  an 
unproved  assumption,  in  asserting  the  possibility  that  the 
world  might  be  older  ?  So,  in  like  manner,  those  who  assert 
that  the  Pastoral  Epistles  cannot  be  Paul's,  because  there  is 
no  room  for  them  in  that  part  of  his  life  which  is  recorded  by 
St.  Luke,  are  bound  to  give  proof  that  this  is  the  whole  of 
his  active  life. 

If  the  Pastoral  Epistles  did  not  exist,  and  if  we  were  left 
to  independent  speculation  as  to  the  issue  of  the  Apostle's 
imprisonment,  we  should  conclude  that  the  supposition  of 
his  release  was  more  probable  than  the  contrary.  We  learn 
from  the  conclusion  of  the  Acts  that  the  Jews  at  Rome  had 
not  been  commissioned  to  oppose  his  appeal ;  and  since, 
until  the  burning  of  Rome  in  64,  the  Imperial  authorities 
had  no  motive  for  persecuting  Christians  as  such,  we  should 
expect  that  the  case  against  Paul,  stated  in  such  a  letter  as 
the  procurator  was  likely  to  send  (Acts  xxv.  25,  xxvi.  32), 
would  end  in  such  a  dismissal  as  that  given  by  Gallio.  And 
this  was  Paul's  own  expectation  both  when  he  wrote  to  the 
Philippians  (Phil.  i.  25,  26;  ii.  24)  and  to  Philemon  (v.  22). 
Possibly  we  have  the  Apostle's  own  assertion  of  his  release 
as  an  actual  fact.  At  least,  when  later  he  is  looking  forward 
to  a  trial,  with  no  sanguine  anticipations  as  to  its  issue,  he 


XX.]  THE    PASTORAL   EPISTLES.  443 

calls  to  mind  (2  Tim.  iv.  16)  a  former  hearing,  when,  though 
earthly  friends  deserted  him,  the  Lord  stood  by  him,  and  he 
was  delivered  out  of  the  mouth  of  the  lion.  St.  Chrysostom 
(in  loc.)  understands  'the  lion'  here  of  Nero,  and  the  verse  as 
intimating  that  Paul's  trial  ended  in  an  acquittal. 

However  this  may  be,  certain  it  is  that  there  was  in  the 
early  Church  a  tradition  of  St.  Paul's  release,  quite  indepen 
dent  of  the  Pastoral  Epistles.     I  have  quoted  (p.  49)  the 
passage  in  the  Muratorian  Fragment  which  speaks  of  Paul's 
journey  to  Spain,  a  statement  which  assumes  his  release  from 
imprisonment ;  and  it  is  at  least  probable  that  Clement  of 
Rome  also  recognizes  the  journey  to  Spain,  when  he  speaks 
(c.  5)  of  Paul's  having  gone  to  the  extremity  of  the  West. 
On  this  evidence  Renan  accepts  the  fact  of  Paul's  release 
{ISAntechrist,  p.  106);  only  he  will  not  let  it  count  anything 
in  favour  of  the  Pastoral  Epistles,  believing  that  the  Apostle 
on  his  release  went,  according  to  the  evidence  just  cited,  to 
the  West,  and  not,  as  these  Epistles  imply,  to  Asia  Minor. 
For  myself,  I  should  think  it  less  probable  that  the  Apostle 
carried  out  the  earlier  intention  expressed  in  the  Epistle  to 
the  Romans  than  the  later  one  expressed  in  the  Epistles  to 
the  Philippians  and  to  Philemon.     But  it  is  not  impossible 
that  he  might  have  done  both.     The  evidence  is  too  slender 
to  warrant  any  positive  assertion  as  to  the  Apostle's  move 
ments  :   and  we  appreciate  more  highly  the  obligations  we 
owe  to  the  Acts  of  the  Apostles  when  we  find  how  much  in 
the  dark  we  are  as  to  St.  Paul's  history  as  soon  as  that  book 
no  longer  guides  us.      My  object  has  been  merely  to  show 
that  those  who  assert  that  St.  Paul  was  not  released  from  his 
Roman  imprisonment  assert  not  only  what  they  cannot  prove, 
but  what  is  less  probable  than  the  contrary.    And  when  once 
the  possibility  is  admitted  of  Apostolic  labours  of  St.  Paul 
later  than  those  recorded  in  the  Acts,  all  the  objections  that 
have    been   urged   against   the   acceptance    of  the   Pastoral 
Epistles   immediately  lose  their  weight. 

Two  objections  to  the  late  date  which  I  have  assigned  to 
these  Epistles  deserve  to  be  noticed.  One  is  that  Paul, 
writing  to  Timothy,  says,  *  Let  no  man  despise  thy  youth ' 
(i  Tim.  iv.  12);  whereas  many  years  must  have  elapsed  be- 


444  THE    PAULINE    EPISTLES.  [XX. 

tween  the  time  at  which  we  first  hear  of  Timothy  in  the  Acts, 
and  the  date  which  I  have  assigned  to  these  Epistles.  But 
when  we  consider  the  office  in  which  Timothy  was  placed 
over  Elders,  with  power  to  ordain  them  and  rebuke;  and 
when  we-  reflect  that  the  name  of  Elder  must,  in  its  first 
application,  have  been  given  to  men  advanced  in  age  (cer 
tainly  I  suppose  not  younger  than  forty-three,  the  legal  age 
for  a  consulship  at  Rome),  we  shall  see  that  even  if  Timothy 
were  at  the  time  as  old  as  thirty  or  thirty-five,  there  would 
still  be  reason  to  fear  lest  those  placed  under  his  government 
should  despise  his  youth.  The  other  objection  is  that  the 
First  Epistle  to  Timothy  was  evidently  written  after  a  recent 
visit  of  Paul  to  Ephesus ;  and  if  we  suppose  this  visit  to  have 
taken  place  after  the  Roman  imprisonment,  we  appear  to 
contradict  what  Paul  said  at  Miletus  to  the  Ephesian  Elders, 
'  I  know  that  ye  all  among  whom  I  have  gone  preaching  the 
kingdom  of  God  shall  see  my  face  no  more'  (Acts  xx.  25). 
Our  first  impression  certainly  is  that  these  words  imply  pro 
phetic  assurance  ;  yet  when  we  look  at  the  rest  of  this  speech 
we  find  the  Apostle  disclaiming  any  detailed  knowledge  of 
the  future,  '  I  go  unto  Jerusalem,  not  knowing  the  things  that 
shall  befall  me  there,'  save  that  he  had  this  general  know 
ledge  that  the  Holy  Ghost  witnessed  in  every  city,  saying, 
bonds  and  afflictions  abide  him.  If  we  are  entitled  thus  to 
press  the  force  of  oTSa,  we  might  assert  confidently  that  the 
Apostle  was  released  from  his  Roman  imprisonment,  for  he 
writes  to  the  Philippians  (i.  25),  '/  know  that  I  shall  abide 
and  continue  with  you  all  for  your  furtherance  and  joy  of 
faith,  that  your  rejoicing  may  be  more  abundant  in  Jesus 
Christ  for  me  by  my  coming  to  you  again.'  A  little  before, 
however,  in  the  same  chapter,  'I  know'  in  one  verse  (19)  is 
modified  by  '  according  to  my  earnest  expectation  and  my 
hope '  in  the  next :  and  when  Paul  says  to  Agrippa,  *  Believest 
thou  the  prophets  ?  I  know  that  thou  believest,'  I  suppose 
he  is  not  speaking  of  supernatural  certain  knowledge  of 
Agrippa's  heart,  but  merely  of  the  strong  persuasion  which 
he  entertained  concerning  the  king's  belief.  Thus,  we  see 
that,  whatever  [our  first  impression  might  have  been,  the 
Apostle's  mode  of  speaking  elsewhere  quite  permits  us  to 


XX.]  THE   PASTORAL   EPISTLES.  445 

understand  that,  in  Acts  xx.  he  is  not  speaking  prophetically, 
but  only  expressing  a  strong  belief,  founded  on  grounds  of 
human  probability,  viz.  his  knowledge  of  the  persecutions 
which  certainly  awaited  him,  and  his  intended  journeys  to 
Rome  and  Spain,  which  were  likely  to  take  him  far  away 
from  Ephesus. 

Renan,  as  you  may  believe,  makes  no  difficulty  in  con 
ceding  that  Paul  when  he  spoke  at  Miletus  had  no  infallible 
knowledge  of  the  future.  But  that,  he  says,  is  not  the  ques 
tion.  '  It  is  no  matter  to  us  whether  or  not  Paul  pronounced 
these  words.  But  the  author  of  the  Acts  knew  well  the  sequel 
of  the  life  of  Paul,  though  unhappily  he  has  not  thought 
proper  to  tell  us  of  it.  And  it  is  impossible  that  he  should 
have  put  into  the  mouth  of  his  master  a  prediction  which  he 
well  knew  was  not  verified.'  I  so  far  agree  with  Renan  that 
I  think  it  likely  that  if  the  author  of  the  Acts  had  known  of  a 
subsequent  return  of  Paul  to  Ephesus,  he  would  have  given 
some  intimation  of  it  in  this  place.  But  this  only  yields 
another  argument  in  favour  of  the  position  in  defence  of 
which  I  have  already  contended,  viz.  that  the  book  of  the 
Acts  was  written  not  long  after  the  date  to  which  it  brings  the 
history,  viz.  the  end  of  Paul's  two  years'  residence  in  Rome. 

It  were,  perhaps,  enough  to  show  that  the  objections  break 
down  which  have  been  made  to  receiving  the  external  testi 
mony  in  favour  of  the  Pastoral  Epistles ;  but  in  the  case  of 
one  at  least  of  these  Epistles,  the  Second  to  Timothy,  the 
internal  marks  of  Pauline  origin  are  so  strong,  that  I  do  not 
think  any  Epistle  can  with  more  confidence  be  asserted  to  be 
the  Apostle's  work.  To  the  truth  of  this  the  assailants  of  the 
Epistle  bear  unwilling  testimony.  There  are  passages  in  the 
Epistle  which  cling  so  closely  to  Paul  that  it  is  only  by  tear 
ing  the  letter  to  pieces  that  any  part  can  be  dissociated  from 
that  Apostle.  Thus,  of  those  who  reject  the  Epistle,  Weisse, 
Hausrath,  Pfleiderer,  and  Ewald,  recognize  the  section  iv. 
9-22,  or  the  greater  part  of  it,  as  a  fragment  of  a  genuine 
Pauline  letter;  and  to  this  view  Davidson  gives  some  kind 
of  hesitating  assent.  Hausrath,  Pfleiderer,  and  Ewald  further 
own  the  section  i.  15-18. 

To  my  mind  there  cannot  be  a  more  improbable  hypo- 


446  THE   PAULINE   EPISTLES.  [XX. 

thesis  than  that  of  genuine  letters  of  Paul  being  used  only 
for  the  purpose  of  cutting  patches  out  of  them  to  sew  on  to 
forged  Epistles,  while  the  fragments  left  behind  are  thrown 
away  and  never  heard  of  again.  You  will  observe,  too,  that 
in  this  case  the  parts  of  the  Second  Epistle  to  Timothy  which 
are  owned  as  genuine  are  just  those  filled  with  names  and 
personal  details,  in  which  a  forger  would  have  been  most 
likely  to  make  a  slip.  It  is  tantamount  to  a  confession  of 
defeat  to  surrender  as  indefensible  all  that  part  of  the  case 
which  admits  of  being  tested,  and  maintain  that  part  only 
with  respect  to  which  prejudices  and  subjective  fancies  do 
not  admit  of  being  checked.  Just  imagine  that  the  case 
had  been  the  other  way.  If  we  were  forced  to  own  that  the 
passages  which  dealt  with  personal  details  were  spurious, 
with  what  face  could  we  maintain  the  rest  of  the  Epistle  to 
be  genuine  ? 

If  we  test  the  remaining  part  of  the  Epistle  we  shall  find 
the  genuine  Pauline  ring  all  through.  Let  us  note  first  the 
exordium  of  the  Epistle.  The  writer  commences  by  thanking 
God  for  the  unfeigned  faith  which  is  in  Timothy,  and  tells 
him  that  without  ceasing  he  has  remembrance  of  him  in  his 
prayers  night  and  day.  Now,  take  Paul's  ten  other  letters, 
and  eight  of  them  commence  with  thanking  God  for  what  he 
has  heard  or  knows  of  the  religious  progress  of  those  whom 
he  addresses.  The  Second  Epistle  to  the  Corinthians  is 
scarcely  an  exception,  for  that  too  begins  with  thanksgiving. 
The  only  clear  exception  is  the  Epistle  to  the  Galatians, 
which  is  a  letter  of  sharp  reproof.  None  of  the  other  New 
Testament  Epistles  resembles  Paul's  in  this  peculiarity.  Of 
the  eight  Epistles  which  begin  with  thanksgiving,  seven  also 
have  in  the  same  connexion  the  mention  of  Paul's  continual 
prayer  for  his  converts.  It  is  characteristic  of  St.  Paul,  that 
even  when  writing  to  Churches  with  which  he  has  in  many 
respects  occasion  to  find  fault,  he  always  begins  by  fixing  his 
thoughts  on  what  there  was  in  those  persons  deserving  of 
praise,  and  by  calling  to  mind  his  constant  prayer  to  God 
on  their  behalf.  Yet  this  characteristic  of  St.  Paul  is  by  no 
means  obtrusive  in  his  writings  ;  very  few  have  noticed  it. 
You  can  answer  each  for  yourselves,  whether,  if  you  had  been 


XX.]  THE   PASTORAL    EPISTLES.  447 

desired  to  write  an  Epistle  in  St.  Paul's  style,  it  would  have 
occurred  to  you  in  what  way  you  must  begin.  Strange  that 
this  characteristic  should  have  been  observed  by  an  imitator 
so  careless  as  to  be  unable  to  copy  accurately  the  salutation, 
'  Grace  and  peace/  with  which  Paul's  Epistles  begin  !  The 
most  plausible  argument  I  can  think  of  putting  into  the 
mouth  of  anyone  who  still  maintains  this  Epistle  to  be  non- 
Pauline,  is  that  the  forger  has  taken  for  his  model  the  Epistle 
to  the  Romans,  which  begins  in  precisely  the  same  way. 
Nay,  there  is  a  further  coincidence,  for  the  next  topic  is  also 
in  both  Epistles  the  same,  namely,  that  there  was  no  reason 
for  being  ashamed  of  the  Gospel  of  Christ  before  the  face  of 
the  hostile  or  unbelieving  world.  But  the  hypothesis  of  con 
scious  imitation  is  in  various  ways  excluded.  In  the  first 
place,  the  mode  of  commencement  is  different  in  the  other 
Epistle  to  Timothy  and  in  that  to  Titus ;  so  that  the  forger, 
if  forger  there  was,  must  have  stumbled  on  this  note  of 
genuineness  by  accident,  and  without  himself  knowing  the 
value  of  it.  And,  secondly,  so  far  from  there  being  the  close 
imitation  of  the  Epistle  to  the  Romans  which  the  hypothesis 
assumes,  the  writer  completely  abandons  that  Epistle  and  its 
leading  ideas,  the  controversy  concerning  faith  and  justifica 
tion  being  wholly  absent  from  the  Pastoral  Epistles.  And 
more  generally,  there  is  a  freeness  of  handling  utterly  unlike 
the  slavishness  of  an  imitator ;  while  the  ideas  introduced 
seem  naturally  to  rise  from  the  circumstances  of  the  writer, 
and  not  to  have  been  borrowed  from  anyone  else. 

I  would  in  the  next  place  call  your  attention  to  the 
abundance  of  details  concerning  individuals  given  in  these 
Epistles.  A  forger  would  take  refuge  in  generalities,  and  put 
into  the  mouth  of  the  Apostle  the  doctrinal  teaching  for 
which  he  desired  to  claim  his  sanction,  without  running  the 
risk  of  exposing  himself  to  detection  by  undertaking  to  give 
the  history  of  Paul's  companions,  of  which  he  must  be 
supposed  to  know  little  or  nothing.  On  the  contrary,  with 
the  exception  of  the  last  chapter  of  the  Epistle  to  the  Romans, 
there  is  no  part  of  the  New  Testament  so  rich  in  personal 
details  as  these  Epistles.  Twenty-three  members  of  the 
Apostolic  Church  are  mentioned  in  the  Second  Epistle  to 


448  THE   PAULINE   EPISTLES.  [XX. 

Timothy.  And  these  are  neither  exclusively  names  to  be 
found  elsewhere,  in  which  case  it  might  have  been  said  that 
they  had  been  derived  from  the  genuine  writings ;  nor  all 
new  names,  in  which  case  it  might  be  said  that  the  forger 
had  guarded  himself  by  avoiding  the  names  of  real  persons, 
and  only  speaking  of  persons  invented  by  himself ;  but,  just 
as  might  have  been  expected  in  a  real  letter,  some  ten 
persons  are  mentioned  of  whom  we  read  in  the  other  scanty 
records  of  the  same  time  which  have  descended  to  us,  the 
remaining  names  being  new  to  us. 

In  the  case  of  the  old  names  new  details  are  confidently 
supplied.  Thus  we  have  in  the  Epistle  to  the  Colossians, 
'Luke,  the  beloved  physician,  and  Demas  greet  you;'  in 
that  to  Philemon,  '  There  salute  thee  Marcus,  Aristarchus, 
Demas,  Lucas,  my  fellow-labourers.'  Now  note  the  treat 
ment  of  these  four  names  in  the  Second  Epistle  to  Timothy. 
There  we  read,  '  Demas  hath  forsaken  me,  having  loved  this 
present  world.  Only  Luke  is  with  me.'  If  this  was  forgery, 
what  a  wonderful  man  the  forger  must  have  been  so  to  realize 
the  personality  of  Paul's  attendants,  as  to  undertake  to  give 
their  history  subsequent  to  the  time  covered  by  the  authentic 
records,  and  to  put  a  note  of  disgrace  on  one  who,  as  far  as 
the  genuine  Epistles  went,  had  been  honourably  recognized 
as  Paul's  fellow-labourer!  The  Second  Epistle  to  Timothy 
has  also  to  tell  of  Marcus.  He  is  supposed  not  to  have  been 
at  the  time  with  Paul,  but  is  commended  as  useful  to  him  in 
the  ministry.  If  a  forger  had  wished  to  represent  one  of 
Paul's  companions  as  failing  him  in  his  hour  of  trial,  he 
would  surely  have  selected  not  Demas  but  Marcus,  who  is 
probably  the  same  as  he  whose  previous  desertion  of  Paul 
caused  the  rupture  between  him  and  Barnabas.  Lastly,  of 
Aristarchus  the  Pastoral  Epistles  have  not  a  word  to  tell, 
although  his  name  ought  to  have  come  in  in  that  enumeration 
of  his  attendants  which  the  Apostle  makes  in  accounting  for 
his  being  left  alone.  The  true  explanation  probably  is  that 
Aristarchus  was  dead  at  the  time.  But  if  it  was  a  forgery, 
how  is  it  that  the  forger,  who  can  so  courageously  give  the 
history  of  Paul's  other  attendants,  fails  in  his  heart  when  he 
comes  to  speak  of  Aristarchus  ?  We  may  also  comment  on 


XX.]  THE    PASTORAL   EPISTLES.  449 

the  clause  '  Titus  to  Dalmatia.'  Surely,  if  it  were  forgery,  the 
forger  would  have  been  consistent,  and  sent  Titus  to  Crete. 
It  is  a  note  of  genuineness  when  a  document  contains  an 
apparent  contradiction  which  is  not  real ;  for  forgers  do  not 
needlessly  throw  stumbling-blocks  in  their  readers'  way. 
Now  the  statement,  'Only  Luke  is  with  me7  (iv.  n),  seems 
inconsistent  with  the  list  of  salutations  (v.  21).  But  we  see  in 
a  moment  that  the  former  verse  does  not  mean  that,  save  for 
Luke,  the  Apostle  was  friendless  at  Rome,  but  only  that  the 
company  of  personal  attendants  who  travelled  about  with  him 
had  all  been  scattered,  leaving  only  Luke  behind.  Now  if  we 
had  been  left  to  form  our  own  conjectures  we  should  have 
imagined  that  Paul,  brought  a  prisoner  to  Rome,  would  have 
been  completely  dependent  on  the  society  and  support  of  the 
Christians  of  the  Church  which  he  might  find  there.  We 
should  hardly  have  thought  of  him  as  this  Epistle  exhibits 
him,  as  if  he  had  made  this  missionary  journey  of  his  own 
choice,  surrounded  by  his  little  band  of  deacons,  sending  them 
on  his  missions,  and  feeling  himself  almost  deserted  when  he 
has  but  one  of  his  retinue  in  attendance  on  him.  This  state 
of  things,  not  consciously  disclosed  in  the  Epistle  but  revealed 
in  the  most  incidental  way,  could  never  have  been  taken  for 
granted  in  this  manner  except  by  one  who  lived  so  close  to 
the  Apostle's  time  as  to  have  perfect  cognizance  of  the  con 
ditions  in  which  he  lived  at  Rome. 

Of  the  members  of  the  Roman  Church  whom  he  mentions, 
one  is  certainly  a  real  person,  Linus,  whom  very  early  tradi 
tion  asserts  to  have  been  the  first  bishop  of  the  Church  of 
Rome.  The  Roman  Church  to  this  day,  and  we  have  reason 
to  think  that  the  practice  is  at  least  as  old  as  the  second  cen 
tury,  commemorates  in  her  Eucharistic  service  the  names  of 
Linus,  Cletus,  Clemens.  These  are  commonly  supposed  to 
have  been,  after  the  Apostles,  the  first  bishops  of  Rome  (see 
Irenaeus,  iii.  3),  and,  by  the  confession  of  everyone,  were 
leading  men  in  that  Church  in  the  latter  part  of  the  first 
century.  Clement,  in  particular,  became  the  hero  of  a  num 
ber  of  legends,  and  was  believed  to  have  been  an  immediate 
disciple  of  the  Apostles.  Yet  neither  the  name  of  Cletus  nor 
of  Clement  appears  in  this  list  which,  if  the  work  were  a 

2  G 


'faLiiny 


THE    PAULINE    EPISTLES.  [XX. 

forgery,  we  must  therefore  suppose  to  have  been  anterior  to 
their  acquiring  celebrity.  Linus  does  appear,  but  in  quite  a 
subordinate  position — 'Eubulus,  and  Pudens,  and  Linus,  and 
Claudia,  and  all  the  brethren.'  If  the  letter  is  genuine,  it  is 
quite  intelligible  that  Linus,  who  at  the  time  the  Epistle  was 
written  was  a  leading  disciple,  though  not  then  the  principal 
one,  might  have  held  the  chief  place  in  the  government  of 
the  Church  after  the  Apostle's  death  ;  but  if  the  letter1  was 
composed  after  he  had  held  that  place,  we  may  be  sure  there 
would  have  been  some  stronger  intimation  of  his  prominence 
here.  Two  other  persons  mentioned  in  the  same  connexion 
are  possibly  persons  of  whom  we  read  elsewhere.  One  of 
Martial's  epigrams  relates  to  a  marriage  between  Pudens  and 
Claudia,  and  a  very  ingenious  case  has  been  made  by  putting 
together  the  notices  in  Martial  and  Tacitus  to  show  that  this 
Claudia  was  a  British  maiden  and  a  Christian.  The  close 
contact  of  the  two  names  in  the  Epistle  is  striking,  but  I 
cannot  pronounce  it  more  than  a  curious  coincidence.  One 
more  personal  reference  I  will  direct  your  attention  to — the 
twice-repeated  mention  of  the  household  of  Onesiphorus. 
You  know,  or  will  know,  the  controversial  use  that  has  been 
made  of  this  passage.  But  from  the  salutation  being  to  the 
household  of  Onesiphorus,  not  to  Onesiphorus  himself,  we 
may  reasonably  conclude  that  Onesiphorus  was  either  dead, 
or  at  least  known  to  the  Apostle  not  to  be  with  his  house 
hold  at  the  time  this  letter  is  written.  There  is  no  difficulty 
about  this  if  all  be  real  history.  But  that  a  forger  should 
have  invented  such  a  refinement,  yet  in  no  way  have  called 
attention  to  it,  is  utterly  incredible. 

I  could  add  many  more  arguments  ;  but  the  impression 
left  on  my  mind  is  that  there  is  no  Epistle  which  we  can 
with  more  confidence  assert  to  be  Paul's  than  the  Second 
to  Timothy.  When  this  is  established,  the  judgment  we 
form  of  the  other  two  Pastoral  Epistles  is  greatly  influenced. 
If  these  two  had  come  by  themselves,  the  way  in  which  both 
begin  would  excite  suspicion.  They  do  not  open  as  do 
Paul's  other  Epistles,  but  commence  by  telling  that  Paul  had 
left  Timothy  at  Ephesus,  Titus  in  Crete.  This  is  informa 
tion  which  his  correspondents  would  not  require  ;  and  we  are 


XX.]  THE    PASTORAL   EPISTLES.  451 

reminded  of  the  ordinary  commencement  of  a  Greek  play  in 
which  information  is  given,  not  for  the  benefit  of  any  per 
sonage  on  the  stage,  but  for  that  of  the  audience.  Yet  as  we 
proceed,  our  suspicions  are  not  confirmed  ;  and  we  must  own 
that  there  is  no  reason  why  St.  Paul  should  not  begin  a  letter 
to  a  disciple  by  reminding  him  of  the  commission  he  had 
entrusted  him  with.  Critics  of  all  schools  agree  that  the  three 
Pastoral  Epistles  have  such  marks  of  common  authorship  that 
all  must  stand  or  fall  together.  The  three  topics  of  objection 
which  I  have  mentioned  as  urged  against  the  Pastoral  Epistles 
turn,  when  any  one  of  the  Epistles  is  acknowledged,  into 
arguments  in  favour  of  the  other  two.  We  cannot  say,  for 
instance,  that  the  diction  is  un-Pauline,  when  there  is  the 
strongest  possible  resemblance  to  the  diction  of  an  Epistle 
which  we  own  to  be  Paul's.  The  admission  of  the  second 
Epistle  forces  us  to  believe  that  Paul  was  released  from  his 
Roman  imprisonment,  and  then  all  the  marks  of  time  in  the 
other  two  Epistles  fit  in  with  the  late  date  which  we  are  thus 
able  to  assign  to  them.  I  see  nothing  in  the  development 
indicated  of  Church  organization  which  is  inconsistent  with 
the  period  we  assign  to  these  letters.  That  Paul,  who  ad 
dressed  the  bishops  and  deacons  of  the  Philippian  Church 
(Phil.  i.  i  ;  see  also  Acts  xx.  28),  should  give  directions  for 
the  choice  of  such  officers  is  only  natural.  If  it  were  true 
that  these  Epistles  intimated  that  there  was  only  one  eTri'ovcoTros 
in  each  Church,  I  should  have  no  difficulty  in  believing  it  on 
their  evidence.  But  in  my  opinion  this  is  more  than  we  are 
warranted  in  inferring  from  the  use  of  the  singular  number  in 
i  Tim.  iii.  2  ;  Tit.  i.  7.  The  omission  to  say  anything  about 
deacons  in  the  latter  Epistle  is  more  like  what  would  occur 
in  a  real  letter  than  in  the  work  of  a  forger.  It  is  not  easy  to 
see  when  the  forger  could  have  lived,  or  with  what  object  he 
could  have  written  ;  or  why,  after  having  succeeded  in  gaining 
acceptance  for  one  of  the  Epistles,  he  should  hazard  detection 
by  writing  a  second,  which  seems  to  add  very  little. 

As  for  the  general  Pauline  character  of  these  letters,  there 
cannot  be  a  better  witness  than  Renan,  who,  while  still  con 
tinuing  to  assert  them  not  to  be  genuine,  every  now  and  then 
seems  staggered  by  the  proofs  of  authenticity  that  strike  him 

2  G   2 


452  THE   PAULINE   EPISTLES.  [XX. 

He  says,  in  one  place,  '  Some  passages  of  these  letters  are  so 
beautiful  that  we  cannot  help  asking  if  the  forger  had  not  in 
his  hands  some  authentic  notes  of  Paul,  which  he  has  incor 
porated  in  his  apocryphal  composition '  (L'Eglise  Chretienne, 
p.  95).  And  he  sums  up  (p.  104):  'What  runs  through  the 
whole  is  admirable  practical  good  sense.  The  ardent  pietist 
who  composed  these  letters  never  wanders  for  a  moment  in 
the  dangerous  paths  of  quietism.  He  repeats  that  the  woman 
must  not  devote  herself  to  the  spiritual  life  if  she  has  family 
duties  to  fulfil :  that  the  principal  duty  of  woman  is  to  bring 
up  children  :  that  it  is  an  error  for  anyone  to  pretend  to  serve 
the  Church  if  he  has  not  all  duly  ordered  in  his  own  house 
hold.  The  piety  our  author  inculcates  is  altogether  spiritual. 
Bodily  practices,  such  as  abstinence,  count  with  him  for  little. 
You  can  feel  the  influence  of  St.  Paul :  a  sort  of  sobriety  in 
mysticism  ;  and  amid  the  strangest  excesses  of  faith  in  the 
supernatural,  a  great  bottom  of  rectitude  and  sincerity.' 


(     453     ) 


XXI. 

THE    EPISTLE    TO   THE    HEBREWS. 


TN  the  controversies  concerning  the  books  which  I  have 
-•-  already  discussed,  we  had  usually  the  deniers  of  the  super 
natural  ranged  on  one  side,  and  those  who  acknowledge  a 
Divine  revelation  on  the  other.  There  is  no  such  division  of 
parties  in  the  controversies  concerning  the  Epistle  to  the 
Hebrews,  which  may  be  described  as  being  more  important 
from  a  literary  than  from  an  evidential  point  of  view.  On 
the  main  point  in  dispute,  whether  or  not  St.  Paul  was  the 
author,  there  was,  as  we  shall  presently  see,  difference  of 
opinion  in  the  early  Church.  At  the  time  of  the  Reforma 
tion,  Erasmus,  Luther,  and  Calvin,  agreed  in  holding  that 
St.  Paul  was  not  the  author  ;  and  at  the  present  day  this  is 
the  opinion  of  a  number  of  divines  whose  orthodoxy  cannot 
be  impeached.  On  the  other  hand,  critics  of  the  sceptical 
school  do  not  dispute  the  antiquity  of  this  Epistle,  nor  the 
consideration  it  has  always  enjoyed  in  the  Church.  The 
general  opinion  is  that  it  was  written  while  the  Temple  was 
still  standing,  that  is  to  say,  before  the  destruction  of  Jeru 
salem.  In  Hilgenfeld's  Introduction  it  is  placed  immediately 
after  the  Epistle  to  the  Philippians,  and  before  any  of  the 
Gospels,  or  the  Acts,  before  the  Apocalypse,  and  before 
2  Thess.,  Colossians,  and  Ephesians,  which  he  does  not  own 
as  Paul's,  as  also  before  the  First  Epistle  of  Peter.  Davidson 
agrees  with  him  in  this  arrangement.  We  have  indisputable 
evidence  to  the  antiquity  of  the  Epistle  in  the  fact  that  it  is 
quoted  copiously — perhaps  more  frequently  than  any  other 
New  Testament  book — in  one  of  the  earliest  of  uninspired 
Christian  writings,  the  Epistle  of  Clement  of  Rome.  Euse- 
bius  (iii.  37)  takes  notice  of  the  attestation  thus  given  by 


454  THE   EPISTLE   TO   THE    HEBREWS.  [XXI. 

Clement  to  the  Epistle  to  the  Hebrews.  Clement's  quota 
tions  indeed  are,  as  usual  with  him,  without  any  formal 
marks  of  citation,  so  that  we  are  not  in  a  position  to  say 
whether  or  not  he  believed  the  Epistle  to  have  been  written 
by  St.  Paul ;  but  we  can  at  least  see  that  he  knew  and  valued 
it.  One  specimen  out  of  many  is  enough  to  exhibit  the 
unmistakeable  use  he  makes  of  it :  '  Who  being  the  brightness 
of  his  majesty,  is  so  much  greater  than  the  angels,  as  he  has 
by  inheritance  obtained  a  more  excellent  name  than  they. 
For  it  is  written,  Who  maketh  his  angels  spirits,  and  his 
ministers  a  flame  of  fire.  But  of  his  Son  thus  saith  the  Lord, 
Thou  art  my  Son,  this  day  have  I  begotten  thee.  Ask  of  me 
and  I  will  give  thee  the  heathen  for  thine  inheritance,  and  the 
utmost  parts  of  the  earth  for  thy  possession.  And  again  he 
saith  to  him,  Sit  on  my  right  hand  until  I  make  thine  enemies 
thy  footstool '  (Clement,  c.  36  ;  Heb.  i.  3,  4,  7,  1 3).  Of  other 
early  traces  of  the  use  of  the  Epistle,  I  only  mention  that 
Polycarp,  both  in  his  Epistle  (c.  12)  and  in  his  last  prayer  at 
his  martyrdom  (Euseb.  iv.  15),  gives  our  Lord  the  title  of 
Eternal  high  priest,  which  I  look  on  as  derived  from  this 
Epistle,  wherein  so  much  is  said  of  our  Lord's  priesthood  ; 
and  that  Justin  Martyr  (Apol.  i.  63),  besides  other  coincidences, 
gives  our  Lord  the  name  of  '  our  Apostle,'  an  expression 
peculiar  to  the  Epistle  to  the  Hebrews  (iii.  i). 

The  Epistle  to  the  Hebrews  was  accepted  as  canonical  by 
the  whole  Eastern  Church,  with  no  exception  that  I  know  of; 
and  that  it  was  St.  Paul's  was  also  the  received  tradition  and 
popular  belief  of  the  East.  Clement  of  Alexandria  unhesi 
tatingly  quotes  the  Epistle  as  Paul's :  '  Paul,  writing  to  the 
Hebrews,  says  so  and  so ;  writing  to  the  Colossians,  says  so 
and  so  '  (Strom,  vi.  8  ;  see  also  Strom,  ii.  22).  Elsewhere  in  a 
passage  referred  to  by  Eusebius  (vi.  14)  he  accounts  for  the 
absence  of  Paul's  name  from  the  commencement,  by  the  sug 
gestion  that  Paul  designedly  suppressed  his  name  on  account 
of  the  prejudice  and  suspicion  which  the  Hebrews  entertained 
towards  him.  He  quotes  another  reason  given  by  the  'blessed 
presbyter,'  by  whom,  there  is  no  doubt,  is  meant  Pantaenus, 
Clement's  predecessor  as  head  of  the  Alexandrian  Cateche 
tical  School,  viz.  that  since  our  Lord  had  been  sent  as  Apostle 


XXI.]  ACCEPTED   AS   PAUL'S   AT   ALEXANDRIA.  455 

to  the  Hebrews,  Paul,  whose  mission  was  to  the  Gentiles, 
through  modesty  suppressed  his  name  when  doing  this  work 
of  supererogation  in  writing  to  the  Hebrews.  Clement  also 
gives  his  opinion  that  Paul  wrote  the  Epistle  in  Hebrew,  and 
that  it  had  been  translated  by  Luke,  from  which  has  resulted 
a  similarity  of  style  between  this  Epistle  and  the  Acts.  We 
need  not  scruple  to  reject  the  notion  that  a  document  is  a 
translation  from  the  Hebrew,  which  has  the  strongest  pos 
sible  marks  of  being  an  original  Greek  composition  ;  and  we 
cannot  attribute  much  value  to  the  reasons  suggested  for  the 
omission  of  Paul's  name ;  but  it  is  plain  that  it  occurred 
neither  to  Pantaenus  nor  Clement  to  doubt  that  Paul  was  the 
author  of  the  Epistle. 

In  the  next  generation  the  traditional  belief  of  Pauline 
authorship  was  still  the  popular  one  at  Alexandria.  Origen 
repeatedly  cites  the  Epistle  as  Paul's  (De  Oral.  §  27,  where 
it  is  coupled  with  the  Epistle  to  the  Ephesians ;  in  Joann. 
t.  2  three  times,  citing  as  Paul's  the  passages  Heb.  i.  2,  ii.  9, 
§  6,  and  vi.  16,  §  1 1  ;  in  Numer.,  Horn.  iii.  3  ;  in  Ep.  ad  Rom. 
vii.  §  i,  ix.  §  36).  In  one  place  he  refers  to  the  fact  that  some 
denied  the  Epistle  to  be  Paul's,  and  promises  to  give  else 
where  a  confutation  of  their  opinion  (Epist.  ad  Africanum, 
9).  But  in  his  homilies  on  the  Epistle,  of  which  extracts 
have  been  preserved  by  Eusebius  (vi.  25),  he  shows  himself 
to  have  become  deeply  impressed  by  the  difference  of  style 
between  this  and  the  Pauline  Epistles  ;  and  he  starts  a  theory 
that  though  the  thoughts  were  Paul's,  he  might  have  employed 
someone  else  to  put  them  into  words.  He  says, '  The  style  of 
the  Epistle  has  not  that  rudeness  of  speech  which  belongs  to 
the  Apostle,  who  confesses  himself  rude  in  speech,  that  is  in 
diction.  But  the  Epistle  is  purer  Greek  in  the  texture  of  its 
style,  as  everyone  will  allow  who  is  able  to  discern  differ 
ences  of  diction.  On  the  other  hand,  the  ideas  of  the  Epistle 
are  admirable,  and  not  inferior  to  the  acknowledged  writings 
of  the  Apostle.  Everyone  will  confess  the  truth  of  this 
who  attentively  reads  the  Apostle's  writings.'  Again  he 
says,  '  I  should  give  as  my  judgment  that  the  sentiments 
are  the  Apostle's,  but  the  language  and  composition  be 
long  to  someone  who  repeated  from  memory  the  Apostle's 


45  &  THE    EPISTLE    TO   THE    HEBREWS.  [XXI. 

teaching,  and,  as  it  were,  expounded  the  things  spoken 
by  his  master.  If  then  any  Church  receives  this  Epistle 
as  Paul's,  let  it  be  commended  for  this  ;  for  it  is  not 
without  reason  that  the  ancients  have  handed  it  down  as 
Paul's.  Who  wrote  the  Epistle,  God  only  knows  certainly. 
But  the  account  that  has  come  down  to  us  is  that  some  say 
that  Clement,  who  was  afterwards  Bishop  of  Rome,  wrote  it ; 
others  that  it  was  Luke,  who  wrote  the  Gospel  and  the 
Acts.'  Notwithstanding  this  criticism  of  Origen's,  the  belief 
in  the  Pauline  authorship  was  little  affected.  Dionysius 
of  Alexandria  refers  to  the  Epistle  as  Paul's  without  any 
expression  of  doubt  (Euseb.  vi.  41),  and  at  a  later  period 
Athanasius  counts  fourteen  Epistles  as  Paul's  (Festal  Epistle, 
39). 

The  Epistle  is  included  in  the  Peshitto  Syriac  translation ; 
but  placed  as  in  our  Bible  ;  and  it  has  been  doubted,  I  do 
not  know  whether  or  not  with  good  reason,  if  this  part  is  of 
the  same  antiquity  as  the  rest. 

Such  was  the  Eastern  opinion  ;  but  in  the  West  quite  a 
different  one  prevailed.  I  have  already  given  proof  that  at 
the  end  of  the  first  century  Clement  of  Rome  valued  the 
Epistle.  It  would  be  natural  to  guess  that  he  accepted  it  as 
Paul's ;  but  on  that  point  we  have  no  evidence,  and  doubts 
are  suggested  by  the  subsequent  history  of  Western  opinion. 
There  are  no  authorities  whom  we  can  cite  until  the  end  of 
the  second  century,  or  the  beginning  of  the  third;  but  at  that 
time  none  of  the  Western  writers  whose  opinion  we  know 
regarded  the  Epistle  as  Paul's.  I  have  already  mentioned 
(p.  51)  that  Eusebius  was  struck  by  the  fact  that  in  a  list  of 
canonical  books  given  by  the  Roman  presbyter  Caius,  at  the 
very  beginning  of  the  third  century,  only  thirteen  Epistles  of 
Paul's  were  counted,  and  that  to  the  Hebrews  was  left  out. 
And  I  mentioned  in  the  same  place  that  the  Muratorian 
Fragment  agrees  in  not  counting  this  among  Paul's  Epistles. 
It  does  not  mention  it  either  among  canonical  books  ;  and 
there  is  a  question  whether  it  does  not  even  put  on  it  a  note 
of  censure.  For  (see  the  passage  quoted,  p.  50)  it  rejects  an 
Epistle  to  the  Alexandrians,  feigned  under  the  name  of  Paul, 
and  favouring  the  heresy  of  Marcion ;  and  many  critics  have 


XXI.]  EARLY   WESTERN    OPINION   ADVERSE.  457 

thought  that  under  this  description  we  are  to  recognize  the 
Epistle  to  the  Hebrews.  But  this  seems  to  me  more  than 
doubtful.  We  have  no  other  evidence  that  this  was  ever 
known  as  an  Epistle  to  the  Alexandrians ;  it  is  not  under  the 
name  of  Paul,  and  it  does  not  favour  the  heresy  of  Marcion. 
That  heretic  did  not  include  the  Epistle  in  his  Canon.  If  I 
were  to  indulge  in  conjecture,  I  should  say  that  the  Epistle 
which  goes  under  the  name  of  Barnabas  better  answers  the 
description ;  but  it  is  quite  possible  that  forged  documents, 
now  lost,  may  have  been  put  forward  in  heretical  circles  at 
Rome.  We  have  other  evidence  that  at  the  epoch  of  which 
I  speak  the  Epistle  was  not  recognized  at  Paul's.  Photius 
(see  p.  363)  has  preserved  a  statement  of  Stephen  Gobar,  a 
writer  of  the  sixth  century,  that  Irenseus  and  Hippolytus 
asserted  that  the  Epistle  was  not  Paul's.  In  point  of  fact  we 
find  very  little  use  of  the  Epistle  made  in  the  great  work  of 
Irenaeus  against  heresies.  There  are  a  few  coincidences,  but 
we  cannot  positively  pronounce  them  to  be  quotations,  and 
certainly  the  Epistle  is  never  referred  to  as  Paul's.  Eusebius, 
however,  tells  us  (v.  26)  that  in  a  book  now  lost  Irenaeus 
does  quote  the  Epistle ;  but  this  still  leaves  the  statement 
uncontradicted  that  he  did  not  regard  it  as  Paul's.  The 
same  thing  may  be  said  about  Hippolytus,  in  the  remaining 
fragments  of  whose  works  there  are  distinct  echoes  of  this 
Epistle ;  but  there  is  no  proof  that  he  regarded  it  as  Paul's. 
But  we  have  in  Tertullian  a  decisive  witness  to  Western 
opinion.  The  controversy  as  to  the  possibility  of  forgiveness 
of  post-baptismal  sin  was  one  which  much  disturbed  the 
Roman  Church  at  the  beginning  of  the  third  century.  The 
suspicion  then  arises  that  opposition  to  this  Epistle  may  have 
been  prompted  solely  by  the  support  afforded  to  the  rigorist 
side  on  this  question  by  the  well-known  passage  in  the  sixth 
chapter,  which  seems  to  deny,  in  some  cases,  the  possibility 
of  repentance  and  forgiveness.  But  what  is  remarkable  is 
that  Tertullian  quotes  this  passage  in  support  of  his  Mon- 
tanist  views ;  yet  though  his  interest  would  be  to  set  the 
authority  of  the  Epistle  as  high  as  possible,  he  seems  never 
to  have  heard  of  the  Epistle  as  Paul's,  and  quotes  it  as  Bar- 
nabas's  ;  and  not  as  canonical,  but  only  as  above  the  level  of 


45 8  THE    EPISTLE   TO   THE   HEBREWS.  [XXI. 

the  Shepherd  of  Hermas.  '  There  is  extant,'  he  says,  '  an 
Epistle  of  Barnabas  addressed  to  the  Hebrews,  written  by  a 
man  of  such  authority  that  Paul  has  ranked  him  with  him 
self:  "I  only  and  Barnabas,  have  not  we  power  to  forbear 
working?"  And  certainly  this  Epistle  of  Barnabas  is  more 
received  than  that  apocryphal  Shepherd  of  the  adulterers' 
(De  Pudic.  20).  This  is  the  language  of  a  man  to  whom  the 
idea  that  the  Epistle  was  Paul's  does  not  seem  to  have 
occurred  ;  and  the  proof  appears  to  be  conclusive  that  in 
Tertullian's  time  the  Pauline  authorship  was  not  acknow 
ledged  in  the  Western  Church. 

St.  Jerome  and   St.  Augustine,   at  the  end  of  the  fourth 
century,  seem  to  have  been  the  main  agents  in  effecting  a 
revolution  of  Western  opinion.     Jerome,  though  a  Western, 
resided  for  a  long  time  in  the  East,  and  was  well  versed  in 
Greek  Christian  literature.     He  therefore  could  not  be  in 
sensible  to  the  fact  of  the  general  acceptance  of  this  Epistle 
in  the  Eastern  Church.     He  quotes  it  repeatedly,  and  more 
often  than  not  without  any  note  of  doubt;    but  sometimes 
with  some  such  phrase  as  '  Paul,  or  whoever  wrote  the  Epistle 
to  the  Hebrews,'  '  Paul,  if  anyone,  admits  the  Epistle  to  the 
Hebrews.'     But  his  most  distinct  utterance  on  the  subject  is 
in  his  Epistle  to  Dardanus  (Ep.  129,  vol.  i.,  p.  965).   There  he 
says  that  this  Epistle  is  received  as  Paul's,  not  only  by  the 
Churches  of  the  East,  but  by  all  previous  Church  writers  in 
the  Greek  language,  though  many  think  it  to  be  the  work  of 
Barnabas  or  Clement ;  and  that  it  is  no  matter  who  wrote  it, 
since  it  is  the  work  of  an  orthodox  member  of  the  Church, 
and  is  daily  commended  by  public  reading  in  the  Churches. 
The   Latins   certainly   do   not   receive  it  among  Canonical 
Scriptures;  but  then  neither  do  the  Greeks  receive  the  Apoca 
lypse  of  St.  John  ;  and  in  both  cases  Jerome  thinks  that  he 
is  bound,  instead  of  following  the  usage  of  his  own  time,  to 
regard  the  authority  of  ancient  writers  who  frequently  quote 
both  books ;  and  that  not  in  the  way  that  they  cite  apocry 
phal  books  (for  heathen  books  they  hardly  cite  at  all),  but  as 
canonical.      Augustine  also  was  influenced  by  the  authority 
of  Eastern  opinion  to  accept  the  book  ;  and  it  was  accepted 
in  Synods  in  which  he  took  part— Hippo  (393);  Carthage, 


XXI.]   ITS   LATE    RECOGNITION   AS    PAUL'S   IN   THE   WEST.    459 

iv.  (397)  ;*  Carthage,  v.  (419) ;  yet  it  is  remarkable  how  often 
he  cites  the  Epistle  merely  as  that  to  the  Hebrews,  apparently 
studiously  avoiding  to  call  it  Paul's. 

The  place  of  the  Epistle  in  our  Bible  testifies  to  the  late 
ness  of  the  recognition  of  the  Epistle  as  Paul's  in  the  West. 
First,  we  have  Paul's  Epistles  to  Churches,  arranged  chiefly 
in  respect  of  their  length,  the  longer  ones  coming  first.  Then 
we  have  Paul's  letters  to  individuals.  Then  comes  this  Epistle 
to  the  Hebrews;  and  this  order,  after  Paul's  acknowledged 
letters,  is  that  which  prevails  in  later,  and  especially  in 
Western  MSS.  But  the  earliest  order  of  all,  concerning  which 
we  have  information,  is  that  of  the  archetype  from  which  the 
Vatican  MS.  was  copied.  In  the  Vatican  MS.  itself,  and  in 
other  Eastern  MSS.  this  Epistle  comes  after  that  to  the  Thes- 
salonians,  and  before  the  letters  to  individuals  ;  but  the 
numbering  of  the  sections  shows  that  the  Vatican  MS.  was 
copied  from  one  in  which  the  Hebrews  stood  still  higher  in 
the  rank  of  Pauline  Epistles,  and  came  next  after  that  to  the 
Galatians.  The  Thebaic  version  placed  it  even  a  step  higher, 
viz.  immediately  before  the  Epistle  to  the  Galatians. 

In  this  conflict  between  early  Eastern  and  Western  opinion, 
if  the  question  be  only  one  as  to  the  canonical  authority  of 
the  Epistle,  we  need  not  doubt  that  the  West  did  right  in 
ultimately  deferring  to  Eastern  authority.  It  is  only  natural 
that  an  anonymous  Epistle  should  be  received  with  hesitation 
in  places  where  the  author's  name  was  not  known  ;  but  since 
the  oldest  and  most  venerable  of  the  Western  witnesses, 
Clement  of  Rome,  agrees  with  the  Easterns  in  accepting  the 
Epistle,  and  since  dissent  is  not  heard  of  in  the  West  till  the 
beginning  of  the  third  century,  we  have  good  grounds  for 
acknowledging  its  canonical  authority.  But  the  tradition  of 
Pauline  authorship  is  not  so  decisively  affirmed  as  to  preclude 
us  from  re-opening  the  question,  and  comparing  this  tradi 
tion  with  internal  evidence. 

I  have  already  said  that  Clement  of  Alexandria  took  notice 
of  one  point  in  which  this  differs  from  all  St.  Paul's  letters, 

*  But  the  Epistle  is  not  classed  with  those  long  recognized  as  Pauline 
in  the  West.  The  list  runs:  '  Epistolae  Pauli  Apostoli  xiii.,  ejusdem  ad 
Hebrseos  una.' 


460  THE    EPISTLE    TO    THE    HEBREWS.  (_XXI. 

namely,  the  suppression  of  his  name  ;  and  Clement's  mode  of 
accounting  for  this  peculiarity  is  not  satisfactory.  In  fact, 
through  all  the  early  part  of  the  work,  we  should  think  that 
we  were  reading  a  treatise,  not  a  letter.  It  is  only  when  we 
come  to  the  end  that  we  find  a  personal  reference — that  to 
Timothy,  and  a  salutation. 

That  salutation,  however,  '  They  of  Italy  salute  you,' 
suggests  a  remark.  This  vague  greeting  is  only  intelligible 
on  the  supposition  that  the  letter  was  written  either  from  or 
to  Italy.  Either  the  writer  is  sending  home  salutations  to 
Italians  from  their  fellow-countrymen  in  a  foreign  land,  or  he 
is  sending  his  correspondents  a  friendly  message  from  the 
natives  of  the  country  in  which  he  writes.  In  either  case 
some  connexion  is  established  between  Italy  and  the  Epistle; 
and  therefore  we  are  disposed  to  consider  the  Italian  tradition 
as  to  the  authorship  with  more  respect  than  we  should  do  if 
the  Epistle  had  been  despatched  from  one  Eastern  city  to 
another. 

There  is  another  passage  which  very  much  weighed  with 
Luther  and  Calvin  in  leading  them  to  reject  the  Pauline 
authorship,  viz.  *  How  shall  we  escape  if  we  neglect  so  great 
salvation,  which  at  the  first  began  to  be  spoken  by  the  Lord, 
and  was  confirmed  unto  us  by  them  that  heard  him  ?'  (ii.  3). 
This  sounds  like  the  language  of  one  of  the  second  generation 
of  Christians,  who  made  no  pretensions  to  have  been  himself 
an  original  witness  of  Christ ;  and  it  contrasts  strongly  with 
the  language  in  which  St.  Paul  in  the  Epistle  to  the  Galatians 
disclaims  having  learned  his  Gospel  from  men.  I  will  not 
say  that  the  argument  is  absolutely  decisive,  because  I  believe 
that,  during  the  interval  between  the  two  Epistles,  opposition 
to  Paul  had  so  died  out  that  there  was  no  longer  the  same 
need  for  self-assertion  ;  and  it  was  no  doubt  true  that  he  had 
not  been  a  personal  attendant  of  our  Lord  during  His  earthly 
ministry.  It  has  been  said,  moreover,  that  when  the  writer 
says  '  us  '  he  is  thinking  rather  of  his  readers  than  of  himself. 
We  may  grant,  therefore,  that  this  verse  is  not  by  itself  suf 
ficient  to  disprove  Pauline  authorship  ;  but  it  must  be  counted 
among  the  considerations  which  are  unfavourable  to  that 
supposition. 


XXI.]  INTERNAL    EVIDENCE.  461 

On  the  other  hand,  there  is  one  passage  which  used  to  be 
quoted  in  confirmation  of  the  Pauline  authorship :  '  Ye  had 
compassion  on  me  in  my  bonds '  (x.  34),  words  which  agree 
with  references  made  by  Paul  to  his  imprisonment  in  uncon- 
tested  Epistles.  But  the  best  critics  now  are  agreed  that  the 
reading  Seoyuus  fiov  probably  owes  its  origin  to  the  persuasion 
of  scribes  that  this  was  a  Pauline  Epistle,  and  that  the  true 
reading  is  Sccr/uW,  which  has  been  adopted  by  the  revisers  of 
the  received  version.  This  reading  makes  better  sense  with 
the  context.  The  writer  is  referring  to  a  time  of  persecution, 
not  extending  to  taking  of  life  (for  he  says  '  they  had  not  yet 
resisted  unto  blood,  striving  against  sin'),  but  reaching  to 
fines  and  imprisonment.  And  he  notes  how  cheerfully  in 
this  persecution  the  Christians  bore  pecuniary  loss  and  other 
sufferings,  and  how  those  that  were  free  exhibited  their 
sympathy  with  the  prisoners.  'Ye  endured  a  great  fight  of 
affliction,  partly  whilst  ye  were  made  a  gazing-stock  both  by 
reproaches  and  afflictions,  and  partly  whilst  ye  became  com 
panions  of  those  that  were  so  used.'  In  every  subsequent 
history  of  early  Christian  martyrdoms,  a  striking  feature  is 
the  interest  shown  in  the  confessors  during  their  imprison 
ment  by  their  brethren  still  free — interest  shown  both  by  gifts 
to  them  and  to  their  jailors  while  they  were  confined,  and  by 
support  and  countenance  given  to  cheer  them  at  the  hearing 
before  the  magistrates.  St.  Paul  (2  Tim.  iv.  16)  notes  it  as 
one  of  the  discouraging  incidents  of  his  first  defence  before 
the  Roman  tribunal,  that  no  man  had  stood  with  him.  A 
century  later  Lucian,  in  his  tale  about  Peregrinus,  scoff's  at 
the  contributions  levied  on  their  brethren  by  those  under 
imprisonment. 

One  other  passage  remains  to  be  noticed  :  '  Know  ye  that 
our  brother  Timothy  has  been  set  at  liberty ' — or,  as  some 
translate  the  words,  '  has  been  sent  away  from  us ' — '  with 
whom,  if  he  come  shortly,  I  will  see  you.'  The  passage  shows 
that  the  writer  was  not  in  bondage  at  the  time  the  letter  was 
written  ;  and  also  that  he  was  either  Paul  or  one  of  his  circle. 
It  does  not  prove  that  he  was  necessarily  Paul  himself;  but 
neither  does  it  disprove  it,  even  though  we  cannot  fix  any 
time  in  Paul's  history  for  this  imprisonment  of  Timothy. 


462  THE    EPISTLE   TO    THE    HEBREWS.  [XXI. 

On  a  comparison  of  the  substance  and  language  of  the 
Epistle  with  those  of  Paul's  acknowledged  writings,  it  ap 
pears,  I  think,  with  certainty  that  the  doctrine  of  the  Epistle 
is  altogether  Pauline.  Some  critics,  who  have  surrendered 
themselves  to  Baur's  theories,  have  referred  the  document  to 
the  conciliatory  school  of  which  they  take  Luke  to  be  a  repre 
sentative  ;  and  some  have  even  asserted  for  it  a  more  pro 
nounced  Judaic  character;  but  as  I  quite  disbelieve  that  at 
the  date  of  the  Epistle  the  Christian  Church  was  divided  into 
two  parties  of  rancorously  hostile  Paulinists  and  anti-Pauli- 
nists,  I  see  nothing  in  the  letter  which  Paul  or  a  disciple  of  his 
might  not  have  written  ;  and  it  certainly  has  strong  traces  of 
Paul's  influence.  In  fact  this  very  letter  may  be  looked  on  as 
furnishing  one  of  the  very  numerous  proofs  how  little  truth 
there  is  in  Baur's  theory  of  a  persistent  schism  in  the  early 
Church.  We  have  here  a  document  earlier  than  the  destruc 
tion  of  Jerusalem;  and,  for  the  writer,  the  controversy  between 
Paulinists  and  anti-Paulinists  absolutely  does  not  exist.  The 
great  distinction  for  him  is  between  unconverted  Jews  and 
Christian  Jews  ;  but  that  there  were  two  classes  of  Christian 
Jews  he  seems  not  to  have  the  slightest  knowledge.  He  is 
himself  a  Paulinist :  the  only  person  he  mentions  by  name  is 
Paul's  favourite  disciple;  yet  he  addresses  Jews  in  a  tone  of 
authority  and  rebuke,  without  any  apparent  fear  that  his  inter 
ference  will  be  resented,  or  that  he  will  be  an  object  of  dislike 
or  suspicion  to  them. 

As  for  the  language,  a  number  of  parallelisms  are  adduced 
between  the  Epistle  to  the  Hebrews  and  the  Pauline  letters. 
Thus,  to  give  one  specimen,  Jesus  is  described  in  the  2nd 
Epistle  to  Timothy  (i.  10)  as  'having  abolished  death'  (Karap- 
y-tjo-avTOS  /xev  rov  tfavarov),  the  use  of  /carapyeco  in  this  sense 
being  peculiar  to  Paul  ;  and  again,  in  i  Cor.  xv.  26,  '  the  last 
enemy  that  shall  be  destroyed  is  death'  (Karapycerat,  6  Odvaros). 
Now  we  have  in  Hebrews  (ii.  14),  '  that  through  death  he 
might  destroy  (Karapyrjo-r))  him  that  had  the  power  of  death.' 
So  again  Paley  has  noticed  it  as  a  habit  of  Paul's  style  to 
ring  changes  on  a  word,  or  to  use  in  the  same  sentence 
several  times  the  same  word  or  different  forms  of  it.  An 
example  will  make  plain  what  I  mean.  It  is  that  in  i  Cor. 


XXI.]  PAULINE   CHARACTERISTICS.  463 

xv.  27,  in  which  the  Apostle  argues  from  the  words,  '  He 
hath  put  all  things  under  his  feet,'  and  the  changes  are 
rung  on  the  word  VTroracrcrw.  ndVra  vTrtra^cv  VTTO  TOU?  TroSas 
O.VTOV.  "Orav  Se  ctTny  on  TTOVTO.  vTrorera/crai,  BrjXov  on  e/cros  TOV 
v7TOTa£avTos  aura)  ra  Travra.  "Orav  Se  VTrorayfj  avrw  ra  TrdVra,  Tore 
KCU  avros  6  wos  vTroray^crerat  TO>  virora^avn  avru>  TO,  Travra.  Here 
we  have  vTroTdWtD  six  times  in  five  lines.  Now  compare  with 
this  the  commentary  in  Hebrews  ii.  8,  on  the  same  verse  of 
Psalm  viii.,  in  which  changes  are  rung  on  the  same  word. 
Ilavra  V7rera£as  VTroKcmo  Ttov  TTOOWV  avrov.  'Ev  yap  TU>  vTrora^at 
avT(3  TOL  TrdVra,  ov'Sev  a<J>rJK€v  avrw  awTTOTa/crov.  Nvv  8e  OUTTO> 
6/oai/Aei/  avV(3  ra  Travra  VTrorcray/xeVa.  Further,  examples  are 
adduced  of  similarity  of  construction  with  that  used  by  St. 
Paul.  Thus,  the  change  of  construction  from  the  third  person 
singular  to  the  first  nominative  plural  in  the  sentence  (He 
brews  xiii.  5),  'Let  your  conversation  be  without  covetousness: 
being  content  with  such  things  as  ye  have'  (a^tXa/ayvpos  o 
TpoTros'  apKovfj,evoL  rot?  TTapovtriv),  is  noted  by  Bishop  Words 
worth  as  exactly  paralleled  by  a  verse  in  Romans  xii.,  '  Let 
love  be  without  dissimulation,  abhorring  that  which  is  evil ' 
(f)  aydirr)  dvuTro/cpiros'  aTroo-rvyowre?  TO  Trovrjpov).  Lastly,  the 
quotation,  '  Vengeance  is  mine,  I  will  repay,  saith  the  Lord/ 
does  not  agree  with  the  Septuagint,  but  is  in  verbal  agree 
ment  with  the  citation  of  the  same  verse  in  Romans  xii.  19. 

These,  and  other  coincidences  with  Paul,  are  more  than 
can  be  attributed  to  accident :  if  the  writer  is  not  Paul,  he 
must  have  read  some  of  Paul's  Epistles — in  particular  those 
to  the  Romans  and  Corinthians.*  On  the  other  hand,  all  the 
other  O.  T.  citations  are  from  the  Septuagint,  even  where 
it  differs  from  the  Hebrew,  which  is  contrary  to  St.  Paul's 
usage.  The  writer  seems  habitually  to  have  used  a  Greek 
not  a  Hebrew  Bible.  A  notable  case  is  his  adoption  of  the 

*  Other  parallels  are  Heb.  xi.  12,  veveKpw/uevos,  Rom.  iv.  19  ;  Heb.  xii. 
14,  elp-r)vt]V  Stw/cere,  Rom.  xiv.  19;  ^era  iravruv,  Rom.  xii.  18 ;  Heb.  i.  6, 
•jrpwTOTOKos,  Rom.  viii.  29  ;  Heb.  xiii.  i,  2  ;  ^>tAa5eA(/)ta,  Rom.  xii.  10  ; 
<^jAo|evm,  Rom.  xii.  13  ;  Heb.  x.  38  =  Rom.  i.  17  ;  Heb.  xiii.  20,  6  debs 
TTJS  €ip-f)vr)s,  Rom.  xv.  33  ;  Heb.  v.  12,  14  =  i  Cor.  iii.  2,  ii.  6;  Heb.  vi.  3 
=  I  Cor.  xvi.  7  ;  Heb.  vi.  10=  2  Cor.  viii.  24  ;  Heb.  viii.  10=  2  Cor.  vi.  16  ; 
Heb.  x.  28  =  2  Cor.  xiii.  i.  There  are  coincidences,  but  not  so  numerous 
or  so  clear,  with  other  Pauline  letters;  for  instance,  Heb.  ii.  2  =  Gal. 
iii.  19. 


464  THE    EPISTLE    TO    THE    HEBREWS.  [XXI. 

LXX.  version,  'A  body  hast  thou  prepared  me'  (x.  5), 
instead  of  the  Hebrew,  '  Mine  ears  hast  thou  opened '  (see 
also  i.  6).  His  formulae  of  Old  Testament  citation  are  also 
different  from  those  generally  used  by  Paul.  He  has  Aeyet, 
or  <j>r)o-i,  sometimes  alone,  sometimes  with  0eos  or  TO 
TO  dytov,  while  St.  Paul  commonly  has  ycypairrai,  or  rj 
ypa<£r)  Ae'yei ;  but  there  are  exceptions  which  prevents  us  from 
pressing  this  argument  confidently  (Eph.  iv.  8,  v.  14;  Rom. 
xv.  10;  2  Cor.  vi.  2;  Gal.  iii.  16). 

This  letter  is  said  to  have  a  much  stronger  Alexandrian 
colouring  than  have  the  writings  of  Paul.  Several  parallels, 
both  as  regards  the  thoughts  and  the  language,  have  been 
pointed  out  in  the  writings  of  Philo  ;  and  there  is  a  larger 
use  of  the  apocryphal  books  of  the  Old  Testament  than  in 
St.  Paul's  Epistles.  With  the  Book  of  Wisdom,  in  particu 
lar,  there  are  so  many  coincidences  that  Dean  Plumptre  has 
defended  a  theory  that  the  two  books  have  the  same  author, 
e.g.  7roA.v/x,epws  i.  I,  Wisdom  vii.  22  ;  aTravyaa-pa  i.  2,  Wisdom 
vii.  26  ;  vTroo-Tcuris  i.  3,  Wisdom  xvi.  21 ;  TOTTOS  /xeTai/ouxs  xii.  17, 
Wisdom  xii.  10;  cK/2ao-ts  xiii.  7,  Wisdom  ii.  17.  Further,  it 
is  urged  that  this  letter  could  not  have  been  written  by  one 
who  had  resided  long  in  Jerusalem,  its  descriptions  of  the 
Temple  ritual  not  being  founded  on  observation,  but  being 
entirely  drawn  from  what  the  Old  Testament  tells  about  the 
Tabernacle. 

But  the  strongest  argument  against  the  Pauline  author 
ship  is  founded  on  the  dissimilarity  of  style  which,  as  I  have 
already  told  you,  was  taken  notice  of  by  Origen.  There  is 
here  none  of  the  ruggedness  of  St.  Paul,  who  never  seems  to 
be  solicitous  about  forms  of  expression,  and  whose  thoughts 
come  pouring  out  so  fast  as  to  jostle  one  another  in  the 
struggle  for  utterance.  This  is  a  calm  composition,  exhibit 
ing  sonorous  words  and  well-balanced  sentences.  In  expla 
nation  of  the  difference  it  may  be  urged  that  this  is  a  treatise, 
rather  than  a  letter,  and  that  therefore  greater  polish  of  style 
is  natural ;  but  the  Epistle  to  the  Romans  has  as  much  the 
air  of  a  treatise  as  that  to  the  Hebrews.  This  argument  from 
the  style  is  that  which  makes  the  strongest  impression  on  my 
own  mind.  I  have  already  shown  that  I  do  not  ascribe  to 


XXI.]  CONJECTURES   AS    TO   AUTHORSHIP.  465 

Paul  any  rigid  uniformity  of  utterance,  and  that  I  am  not 
tempted  to  deny  a  letter  to  be  his  merely  because  it  contains 
a  number  of  words  or  phrases  which  are  not  found  in  his 
other  compositions ;  but  in  this  case  I  find  myself  unable  to 
assert  the  Pauline  authorship  in  the  face  of  so  much  unlike- 
ness,  in  the  structure  of  the  sentences,  in  the  general  tone  of 
the  Epistle,  in  the  way  of  presenting  doctrine,  and  in  other 
points  that  I  will  not  delay  to  enumerate. 

But  if  the  letter  be  not  Paul's,  whose  then  can  it  be  ? 
There  are  but  two  names  which  seem  to  me  worthy  of  discus 
sion.  Luther  guessed  Apollos  ;  and  if  we  are  to  trust  to  con 
jecture  solely,  no  conjecture  could  be  more  happy,  for  it  seems 
to  fulfil  every  condition.  Apollos  belonged  to  the  circle  of 
Paul,  whose  influence  on  this  Epistle  is  strongly  marked ;  and 
he  would  of  course  also  be  intimate  with  Timothy ;  he  was  an 
eloquent  man,  and  mighty  in  the  Scriptures  (Acts  xviii.  24), 
a  description  which  admirably  suits  the  writer  of  this  letter ; 
and  he  was  a  native  of  Alexandria,  whereby  the  Alexandrian 
colouring  of  the  Epistle  is  at  once  accounted  for.  There  is 
only  one  thing  against  this  conjecture,  and  that  is  that  Luther 
should  have  been  the  first  to  make  it.  I  will  not  urge  this 
objection  over  strongly,  because  if  one  sentence  of  Tertullian's 
had  not  been  preserved  we  should  have  no  external  evidence 
deserving  of  consideration  for  any  authorship  but  Paul's. 
We  may  dismiss  as  a  mere  guess  the  suggestion  thrown  out 
in  the  Alexandrian  schools  that  Paul  might  have  employed 
the  pen  of  Luke  or  of  Clement ;  and  the  guess  is  not  even  a 
probable  one.  If  dissimilarity  of  style  is  a  good  reason  for 
believing  the  Epistle  not  to  be  Paul's,  the  same  argument 
proves  it  not  to  be  Luke's  or  Clement's,  each  of  whom  has 
left  writings  very  different  in  style  from  the  Epistle  to  the 
Hebrews. 

But  what  Tertullian  says  cannot  be  passed  by  without 
serious  examination.  When  he  speaks  of  Barnabas  as  the 
author  he  is  plainly  not  making  a  private  guess,  but  express 
ing  the  received  opinion  of  the  circle  in  which  he  moved. 
And  since  Tertullian  was  not  only  a  leading  teacher  in  the 
Church  of  Africa,  but  had  resided  for  some  time  at  Rome,  I 
do  not  see  how  to  avoid  the  conclusion  that  at  the  beginning 

2  H 


446  THE   EPISTLE   TO   THE    HEBREWS.  [XXI. 

of  the  third  century  the  received  opinion  in  the  Roman  and 
African  Church  was  that  Barnabas  was  the  author  of  the 
Epistle. 

I  freely  own  that  if  I  had  been  set  to  conjecture  the  author, 
I  should  never  have  guessed  Barnabas ;  but  it  is  no  reason 
for  rejecting  a  statement,  apparently  coming  on  good  autho 
rity,  that  it  is  not  like  what  conjecture  would  have  prompted. 
What  we  must  really  inquire  is,  whether  there  is  anything 
about  the  statement  so  improbable  as  to  make  us  unable  to 
receive  it.  The  Epistle  to  the  Hebrews  seems  to  have  been 
written  after  Paul's  death  ;  and  we  should  not  expect  Bar 
nabas  to  have  survived  Paul  as  an  active  worker ;  for  he  was 
not  only  the  older  Christian  (Acts  ix.  27),  but  apparently  the 
older  man  ;  seeming  to  be  of  some  standing  (Acts  iv.  36), 
when  Paul  is  described  as  a  young  man  (Acts  viii.  58).  I  may 
add  that  Barnabas  was  taken  for  Jupiter  when  Paul  was  taken 
for  Mercurius  (Acts  xiv.  12);  but  this  point  cannot  be  pressed, 
since  the  cause  of  the  latter  designation  was  Paul's  powers  of 
speech,  and  not  his  personal  appearance.  In  any  case,  if 
Barnabas  were  the  older,  he  might  still  have  survived  Paul, 
who  did  not  die  of  old  age  but  by  martyrdom.  Again,  the 
missionary  work  of  Barnabas  has  been  so  overshadowed  by 
that  of  his  companion  Paul,*  that  it  is  natural  to  us  to  think 
of  Barnabas  as,  though  a  very  good  man,  not  so  able  a  man 
as  the  writer  of  the  Epistle  to  the  Hebrews  must  have  been. 
If  this  be  our  impression,  we  ought  to  bear  in  mind  how  very 
little  we  really  know  of  the  grounds  of  the  prominent  position 
which  Barnabas  unquestionably  held  in  the  early  Church. 
He  probably  was  inferior  to  Paul  as  a  speaker  ;  but  we  have 
no  such  knowledge  as  would  justify  an  assertion  that  he  was 
incapable  of  writing  the  letter  which  has  been  attributed  to 
him.  The  reason  why  we  know  so  little  of  the  missionary 
work  of  Barnabas  after  his  separation  from  Paul  is  simply 


*  In  the  early  part  of  his  story  St.  Luke  always  speaks  of  '  Barnabas 
and  Saul'  (Acts  xi.  30,  xii.  25,  xiii.  2).  But  when  he  comes  to  relate 
their  missionary  tour,  the  order  becomes  '  Paul  and  Barnabas '  (Acts  xiii. 
43,  46,  50).  In  Acts  xv.  22,  St.  Luke,  speaking  in  his  own  person,  says 
'Paul  and  Barnabas;'  but  (v.  25)  faithfully  reports  the  order  of  the 
Apostolic  letter  '  Barnabas  and  Paul.' 


XXI.]  WAS  BARNABAS   THE   AUTHOR  ?  467 

that  no  Luke  has  recorded  it  for  us.  Further,  it  is  pointed  out 
that  this  Epistle  is  very  unlike  that  which  goes  by  the  name 
of  Barnabas.  But  if  it  be  admitted  that  only  one  of  the  two 
Epistles  can  be  the  work  of  Barnabas,  we  have  a  better  right 
to  claim  for  him  that  which  Tertullian  ascribes  to  him,  than 
that  which  almost  all  critics  reject  as  spurious. 

Once  more,  it  is  said  that  the  Levite  Barnabas  would  be 
sure  to  have  a  first-hand  knowledge  of  the  Temple  worship, 
and  would  not  speak,  as  this  writer  does,  like  one  who  had 
derived  his  knowledge  from  books  ;  he  would  have  been  fami 
liar  with  Hebrew,  and  not  have  used  the  Septuagint  as  his 
Bible  ;  nor  can  we  think  of  him  as  so  subject  to  Alexandrian 
influences  as  the  author  of  our  Epistle  appears  to  have  been. 
When  Barnabas  is  described  as  a  Levite,  all  I  think  that  we 
are  entitled  to  infer  is  that  he  had  preserved  his  genealogy, 
and  knew  that  the  tribe  of  Levi  was  that  to  which  he  belonged. 
I  do  not  think  we  are  bound  to  suppose  that  he  was  a  Levite 
ministering  in  the  Temple  service.  But  the  important  ques 
tion  is,  Was  he  a  Hellenist,  or  did  he  reside  habitually  at 
Jerusalem  ?  The  early  part  of  the  Acts  would  dispose  us  to 
form  the  latter  opinion.  It  is  certain  that  he  early  gained 
consideration  in  the  Church  at  Jerusalem  by  the  gift  of  the 
price  of  his  estate ;  but  it  is  not  stated  that  Jerusalem  had 
been  his  ordinary  dwelling-place.  He  certainly  had  a  near 
relation,  Mary,  the  mother  of  Mark,  resident  at  Jerusalem 
(Acts  xii.  12,  Col.  iv.  10).  But  he  himself  is  described  as  a 
native  of  Cyprus,  and  as  keeping  up  his  relations  with  that 
island;  for  it  is  Cyprus  which  he  first  visits  when  starting  with 
Paul  on  a  missionary  journey,  and  again  Cyprus  to  which  he 
turns  when  separating  from  Paul  and  travelling  with  Mark. 
When  men  of  Cyprus  made  converts  among  the  Hellenists* 
of  Antioch,  Barnabas  was  judged  by  the  Apostles  the  most 
suitable  person  to  take  charge  of  the  newly-formed  Church. 
How  long  he  had  previously  been  residing  at  Jerusalem  we 
cannot  tell,  but  from  that  time  forth  we  never  hear  of  him  as 
resident  in  Jerusalem  again.  And  it  must  be  remembered 
that,  even  if  it  were  proved  that  Barnabas  had  resided  for  a 

*  See  Dr.  Hort's  note  on  the  various  reading  of  Acts  xi.  20. 
2  H  2 


468  THE    EPISTLE   TO   THE    HEBREWS.  [XXI. 

long  time  in  Jerusalem,  it  would  not  follow  that  he  was  not 
a  Hellenist,  since  we  know  from  Acts  vi.  that  there  were 
Hellenists  who  lived  at  Jerusalem,  and  died  leaving  widows 
behind  them  there. 

That  Barnabas  was  acquainted  with  Alexandrian  specula 
tion  is  a  thing  which  we  should  not  have  been  justified  in 
asserting  without  evidence ;  but  we  have  as  little  ground  for 
contradicting  good  evidence  that  he  was.  And  that  Alexan 
drian  philosophy  should  be  taught  in  the  schools  of  Cyprus  is 
in  itself  probable.  I  may  mention,  though  without  myself 
attaching  much  importance  to  the  point,  that  the  Clemen 
tine  Homilies*  represent  Barnabas  as  teaching  in  Alexandria 
immediately  after  the  Ascension  ;  and  in  this  they  have  been 
followed  in  several  later  legends.  On  the  whole,  feeling  that 
the  Western  tradition  in  favour  of  the  authorship  of  Barnabas 
deserves  to  be  regarded  as  having  some  historical  value,  I  do 
not  find  myself  at  liberty  to  reject  it  merely  because,  if  I  had 
been  dependent  on  conjecture  alone,  I  should  have  been 
tempted  to  give  a  different  account  of  the  matter.  This  view 
is  taken  also  by  Renan  (L'Antechrist,  p.  xvii.). 

To  what  Church  are  we  to  suppose  the  Epistle  to  have 
been  addressed  ?  The  inscription,  which  is  of  immemorial 
antiquity,  says,  '  to  the  Hebrews, 'f  by  which  we  must  under 
stand  the  Christians  of  Jerusalem,  or  at  least  of  Palestine. 
For  the  promise  (xiii.  23)  that  the  writer  would  come  and  see 
those  whom  he  addresses  makes  it  impossible  to  suppose  that 
this  is  a  letter  to  Jewish  Christians  scattered  all  over  the 
world,  and  not  to  a  particular  Church.  The  certain  antiquity 
of  the  inscription  is  a  strong  reason  for  not  lightly  rejecting 
its  statement ;  and  there  are  two  considerations  which  confirm 
it.  One  is,  that  throughout  the  Epistle  no  mention  is  made 

*  The  Recognitions,  which  I  count  as  the  earlier  document,  make  Rome 
the  scene  of  the  preaching  of  Barnabas.  I  take  the  view  of  Lipsius  and 
Harnack,  that  the  desire  of  the  Church  at  Rome  to  claim  Peter  as  their 
first  founder  made  a  story  unpopular  which  represented  his  preaching  at 
Rome  as  preceded  by  that  of  another  Evangelist.  Hence,  the  later  ver 
sion  of  the  legend  transferred  Barnabas  to  Alexandria  :  afterwards,  when 
the  labours  of  Barnabas  in  Italy  were  acknowledged,  he  was  handed  over 
to  the  Church  of  Milan. 

f  The  passages  in  the  N.  T.  where  the  word  '  Hebrews  '  occurs  are  Acts 
vi.  i,  2  Cor.  xi.  22,  Phil.  iii.  5. 


XXI. J  TO   WHAT   CHURCH    ADDRESSED  ?  469 

of  Gentile  Christians — the  writer  assumes  that  all  whom  he 
addresses  are  of  the  seed  of  Abraham.  But  no  one  dates  the 
Epistle  much  earlier  than  the  year  64  ;  and  where,  except  in 
Palestine,  could  we  find  at  that  date  a  Church  of  which  Gen 
tiles  did  not  form  a  part,  and  probably  the  largest  and  most 
influential  part  ?  The  second  consideration  is,  that  no  other 
Church  claims  the  Epistle.  If  it  were  sent  to  Jerusalem,  the 
destruction  of  that  city  a  very  few  years  afterwards,  and  the 
dispersion  of  its  Christian  inhabitants,  would  explain  the 
absence  of  a  more  distinct  tradition.  But  there  is  no  reason 
why  any  other  Church  to  which  the  letter  had  been  addressed 
should  not  have  preserved  the  tradition,  and  taken  pride  in 
claiming  this  Epistle  as  its  own.  Those  who  suppose  Apollos 
to  have  been  the  author  very  commonly  suppose  also  that  it 
was  addressed  to  the  Church  at  Alexandria.  But  if  so,  how  is 
it  that  the  members  of  that  Church  kept  no  memory  of  their 
own  connexion  with  the  letter  ?  How  is  it  that  they  knew 
less  than  did  Christians  in  the  West  of  the  true  account  of  the 
authorship  ?  How  is  it  that  the  general  popular  belief  at 
Alexandria  was  that  Paul  was  the  author;  while  their  most 
learned  men,  who  found  difficulties  in  that  supposition,  were 
reduced  to  guess-work  in  order  to  get  over  them  ?  The  same 
argument  may  be  used  as  concerns  Ephesus  and  other  sup 
posed  destinations.  There  were  for  many  years  afterwards 
flourishing  Churches  in  the  places  in  question,  none  of  which 
was  likely  to  have  forgotten  so  important  an  event  in  its  his 
tory  as  the  receipt  of  this  letter.  And  the  same  thing  may  be 
said  as  to  Kenan's  theory  that  the  letter  was  addressed  to 
Rome.  If  so,  why  did  not  the  Church  of  Rome  claim  it  ? 
But  there  is  a  still  graver  objection.  For  Renan  supposes 
the  letter  to  have  been  written  after  the  Neronian  persecution, 
of  which  the  imprisonment  of  Timothy  may  have  been  one  of 
the  incidents.  How  could  a  Church  which  had  just  gone 
through  so  fiery  a  trial  be  addressed  in  the  words  (xii.  4),  '  Ye 
have  not  yet  resisted  unto  blood,  striving  against  sin  '? 

Against  the  claims  of  Jerusalem  it  had  been  objected  that 
the  writer's  praise  of  his  correspondents'  beneficence  (vi.  10) 
is  not  applicable  to  the  Church  at  Jerusalem,  which  was  rather 
the  object  of  the  beneficence  of  foreign  Churches.  But,  on  the 


47°  THE    EPISTLE   TO   THE    HEBREWS.  [XXI. 

other  hand,  there  was  no  Church  to  which  the  charge,  '  Be 
not  forgetful  to  entertain  strangers '  (xiii.  2),  could  be  more 
fitly  addressed  than  that  Church  which  was  the  object  of 
periodical  visits  from  Christians  of  Jewish  birth  throughout 
the  world.  And  the  alacrity  with  which  this  duty  was  fulfilled 
might  well  have  earned  the  commendations  of  ch.  vi.,  even 
without  taking  into  account  the  ordinary  exercise  of  liberality 
from  richer  to  poorer  brethren.  But  the  chief  reason  why 
some  have  rejected  the  claims  of  Jerusalem  is  the  imagined 
hostility  between  the  Christians  of  Palestine  and  the  Pauline 
party,  which  is  thought  to  make  it  inconceivable  that  a  Pau 
line  Christian  should  write  to  native  Jews,  addressing  them  in 
a  tone  of  great  authority,  and  expecting  to  get  a  friendly  and 
respectful  hearing.  But  I  must  set  aside  this  objection  as 
arising  from  a  mere  prejudice.  The  last  act  of  Paul  before 
he  lost  his  liberty  was  to  go  up  to  attend  a  feast  at  Jerusalem; 
and  for  the  unprosperous  issue  of  that  visit,  unbelieving,  and 
not  Christian,  Jews  were  responsible.  Have  we  any  reason 
to  suppose  that  those  of  Paul's  company  who  were  '  of  the 
circumcision '  were  so  disgusted  by  the  misfortune  of  their 
leader,  that  they  thenceforward  ceased  to  attend  the  feasts  ? 
And  in  particular,  have  we  any  reason  to  suppose  that  Bar 
nabas  discontinued  this  practice  ?  or  have  we  any  reason  to 
think  that  he  ceased  to  enjoy  that  consideration  among  the 
heads  of  the  Church  at  Jerusalem,  which  the  earlier  story 
exhibits  him  as  possessing? 

It  seems  to  me  a  probable  account  of  the  origin  of  the 
Epistle,  that  Barnabas — if  anyone  prefer  to  say  Apollos  I 
shall  not  object,  though  Barnabas  seems  to  me  the  more  pro 
bable — going  up  to  keep  at  Jerusalem  a  feast,  subsequent  to 
those  recorded  in  the  Acts  of  the  Apostles,  found  the  Church 
suffering  from  the  pressure  put  on  its  members  by  their  un 
converted  brethren,  in  consequence  of  which  many  of  them 
had  fallen  away  from  the  faith,  and  returned  to  Judaism. 
The  visitor  might  then  have  spoken  strongly  of  the  disgrace 
and  danger  incurred  by  those  who  gave  up  the  better  for  the 
worse.  He  might  have  spoken  of  the  superiority  of  Jesus, 
the  mediator  of  the  new  covenant,  over  the  highest  of  those 
intermediaries,  whether  human  or  angelic,  through  whom  the 


XXI.]  TO   WHAT    CHURCH    ADDRESSED  ?  47  I 

Jews  boasted  that  they  had  received  their  Law  ;  and  of  the 
High  Priesthood  of  Christ  as  making  an  atonement  for  sin 
better  than  any  that  the  Jewish  sacrifices  could  have  accom 
plished.  If  any  such  teaching  were  delivered  in  the  Church 
of  Jerusalem  as  that  expounded  in  the  Epistle  to  the  Hebrews, 
I  can  well  imagine  the  heads  of  that  Church  expressing  a  wish 
to  their  trusted  friend  that  his  doctrine  should  be  embodied  in 
a  permanent  form.  It  has  been  objected,  How  could  one  who 
did  not  profess  to  be  an  original  disciple  of  our  Lord  (ii.  3) 
presume  on  such  a  tone  of  rebuke  as  in  v.  12  ?  But  if  the 
writer  were  Barnabas,  although  he  was  probably  not  an 
original  disciple,  yet  he  was  a  man  of  such  standing  and 
consideration,  that  he  could  well  take  upon  him  to  reproach 
the  members  of  this,  the  oldest  of  the  Churches,  that  they, 
who  ought  to  be  the  teachers  of  others,  should  themselves 
need  elementary  instruction.  In  fact,  if  it  be  once  conceded 
that  the  letter  was  addressed  to  the  Church  of  Jerusalem,  the 
case  for  the  authorship  of  Barnabas  becomes  very  strong. 
Though  I  have  refused  to  accept  the  Tubingen  theory  as  to 
the  amount  of  hostility  between  Pauline  and  Palestinian 
Christians,  we  know  from  Acts  xxi.  that  there  were  many 
in  Jerusalem  who  regarded  Paul  with  prejudice  and  suspi 
cion,  and  therefore  that  an  ordinary  member  of  his  company 
would  not  be  counted  in  Jerusalem  a  grata  persona,  whose 
instructions  would  be  gladly  received,  and  whose  rebukes 
would  be  deferentially  submitted  to.  Further,  the  Epistle  to 
the  Hebrews  is  a  letter  in  which  one  who  thought  and  wrote 
in  Greek,  and  who  seems  only  to  have  used  a  Greek  Bible, 
presumes  to  instruct  Hebrew-speaking  Christians.  We 
could  understand  that  such  an  act  might  be  ventured  on 
by  Barnabas,  whose  early  munificence  to  the  Church  at 
Jerusalem,  and  long  acquaintance  with  its  rulers,  gave  him 
consideration.  But  I  find  it  hard  to  believe  that  Apollos,  or 
any  other  of  Paul's  company,  could  use  the  same  freedom. 

When  we  regard  the  letter  as  not  written  to  Italy,  xiii.  24 
leads  us  to  think  that  it  was  written  from  Italy :  and  we  have 
then  an  explanation  why  the  salutation*  should  be  in  general 

*  There  is  some  kind  of  parallel  to  the  vagueness  of  this  salutation  in 
that  from  the  '  Churches  of  Asia  '  (i  Cor.  xvi.  19). 


47  2  THE    EPISTLE   TO    THE    HEBREWS.  [XXI. 

terms.  If  the  greeting  were  from  definite  persons,  known  to 
his  correspondents,  why  should  not  their  names  be  mentioned  ? 
But  I  take  this  to  be  merely  a  general  intimation  that  the 
Hebrew  Christians  were  held  in  kindly  remembrance  by  the 
disciples  of  the  place  whence  the  letter  was  written. 

Concerning  the  date  of  the  Epistle,  it  is  generally  agreed 
that  it  was  written  before  the  destruction  of  Jerusalem.  We 
cannot  rely  absolutely  on  the  use  of  the  present  tense  in 
speaking  of  the  Temple  services — this  way  of  speaking  being 
employed  by  Clement  of  Rome  and  others  who  lived  after  the 
destruction  of  Jerusalem.  But  the  whole  argument  of  ch.  x., 
which  asserts  the  superiority  of  Christ's  unique  and  final 
sacrifice  over  those  Jewish  sacrifices,  which  betrayed  their  in 
sufficiency  by  their  need  of  constant  repetition,  can  hardly  be 
reconciled  with  the  supposition  that  the  Jewish  sacrifices  had 
come  to  an  end  before  the  time  of  writing,  and  were  then  no 
longer  constantly  repeated.  And,  besides,  if  we  are  to  sup 
pose  the  letter  written  after  the  destruction  of  Jerusalem,  we 
could  not  account  for  the  absence  of  all  reference  to  an  event 
so  terrible  to  every  Jewish  mind,  unless  we  were  able  to  push 
down  the  date  of  the  Epistle  so  late  that  the  impression  made 
by  the  fate  of  their  city  might  be  supposed  to  have  died  away. 

As  the  destruction  of  Jerusalem  furnishes  a  lower  limit  to 
the  date  of  the  Epistle,  so  the  Neronian  persecution  has  been 
held  to  give  a  superior  limit ;  so  that  the  date  would  come 
between  64  and  69  :  say  66  or  67.  I  feel  by  no  means  sure 
that  the  letter  may  not  have  been  earlier  than  the  time  here 
assigned.  If  we  compare  this  book  with  the  Apocalypse,  its 
calmness  contrasts  forcibly  with  the  indignant  description  in 
the  latter  book  of  the  woman  '  drunken  with  the  blood  of  the 
saints,  and  with  the  blood  of  the  martyrs  of  Jesus'  (xvii.  6). 
Renan  finds  a  clear  reference  to  the  Neronian  persecution  in 
Heb.  x.  33,  and  especially  in  the  word  0eaTpi£o/*evoi.  But 
much  stress  cannot  be  laid  on  this  word,  which  has  its 
parallel  in  i  Cor.  iv.  9  ;  and  when  the  writer  speaks  of  the 
*  former  days'  of  the  Church,  he  can  hardly  be  supposed  to 
refer  to  what  had  taken  place  only  a  couple  of  years  before. 
I  look  on  the  reference  in  the  passage  just  cited  to  be  to  the 
persecution  that  followed  the  death  of  Stephen.  The  verse 


XXI.]  ITS    DATE.  473 

implies  that  the  persecution  under  which  the  Church  addressed 
was  actually  suffering  was  not  so  severe  as  that  earlier  trial. 
In  any  case  it  did  not  extend  to  the  taking  of  life.  The  ex 
hortation  at  the  beginning  of  ch.  xii.,  and  the  verse  xiii.  3, 
would  lead  us  to  think  that  the  disciples  were  then  liable  to 
suffer  from  legal  penalties  of  a  lesser  kind.  But  their  con 
stancy  would  be  severely  tried  if  they  had  to  bear  no  other 
penalties  than  those  which,  without  the  sentence  of  any 
magistrate,  a  bigoted  people  are  wont  to  inflict  on  a  minority 
who  live  among  them  professing  an  unpopular  creed.  We 
can  see  that  some  of  the  disciples  were  unable  to  bear  the 
pressure  thus  put  on  them,  their  faith  having  failed  through 
impatience  at  the  delay  of  the  second  coming  of  their  Lord 
(x.  36,  37).  It  is  quite  possible  that  Jewish  Christians  in 
Palestine  might  have  been  subjected  to  the  trials  here 
described,  before  the  breaking  out  of  Nero's  persecution  ; 
and  the  verse  xii.  4  seems  to  me  to  oblige  us  to  date  the 
Epistle  before  A.D.  63,  which  was  probably  the  year  of  the 
martyrdom  of  James  the  Just.  But  since  we  can  in  no  case 
assign  a  very  early  date  to  the  letter,  differences  of  opinion 
as  to  its  date  are  not  wide  enough  to  make  it  worth  while  to 
spend  more  time  on  the  discussion. 


NOTE. 

As  a  further  proof  of  what  was  stated  (p.  459)  concerning  the  late 
recognition  of  this  Epistle  in  the  West,  it  may  be  mentioned  that  the 
Codex  Claromontanus ,  written  in  the  sixth  century,  the  oldest  Graeco-Latin 
MS.  of  the  Pauline  Epistles,  was  copied  from  one  which  did  not  contain 
the  Epistle  to  the  Hebrews.  At  the  end  of  each  book  mention  is  made  of 
that  which  next  succeeds.  For  example,  at  the  end  of  Titus,  '  ad  Titum 
explicit,  incipit  ad  Filemona;'  but  at  the  end  of  Philemon  we  have  (merely 
*  ad  Filemona  explicit.'  Then  follows  a  stichometrical  catalogue  of  the 
books  both  of  Old  and  New  Testament,  after  which  comes  the  Epistle  to 
the  Hebrews.  The  catalogue  in  question  is  carelessly  written.  It  does 
not  contain  either  Philippians  or  Thessalonians — probably  from  the  eye  of 
the  scribe  having  caught  Philemon  when  he  ought  to  have  written  Philip 
pians.  Nor  does  it  include  Hebrews  ;  but  after  Jude,  and  before  the  Apo 
calypse  and  the  Acts,  comes  the  'Epistle  of  Barnabas,'  for  which  are  set 
down  *  Vers.  850,'  this  being  about  the  length  ascribed  to  the  Hebrews  in 


474  THE   EPISTLE   TO   THE   HEBREWS.  [XXI. 

other  catalogues.  In  this  catalogue  I  Cor.  is  set  down  as  having  1060 
verses,  a  number  bearing  to  850  a  proportion  fairly  corresponding  to  that 
between  the  actual  lengths  of  I  Cor.  and  Hebrews  :  whereas  the  so-called 
Epistle  of  Barnabas  is  nearly  half  as  long  again  as  Hebrews.  Hence  it 
has  been  conjectured  that  it  is  the  Epistle  to  the  Hebrews  which  here  goes 
by  the  name  of  Barnabas  ;  and  the  place  in  which  it  comes  may  strengthen 
this  inference.  After  the  Epistle  of  Jude  comes  the  Epistle  of  Barnabas 
(verses,  850),  the  Revelation  of  John  (1200),  the  Acts  of  the  Apostles 
(2600),  the  Shepherd  (4000),  the  Acts  of  Paul  (3560),  the  Revelation  of 
Peter  (270).  If  what  we  know  as  the  Epistle  of  Barnabas  had  been 
intended,  we  should  expect  it  to  come,  not  before  the  Acts  of  the  Apostles, 
but  in  company  with  the  last  three  books,  with  which  it  is  associated  in 
the  v6da  of  Eusebius  (see  p.  475). 

Cod.  Augiensis,  an  inter-columnar  Graeco-Latin  MS.  of  the  Pauline 
Epistles  of  the  gth  century,  does  not  contain  the  Epistle  in  Greek,  but 
gives  a  Latin  version  occupying  both  columns  ;  whence  we  may  infer  that 
the  Greek  of  this  MS.  was  derived  from  an  archetype  which  did  not  contain 
this  Epistle. 


(     475     ) 


XXII. 

THE  FIRST  EPISTLE  OF  ST.  PETER. 


TVTEXT  after  the  Pauline  Epistles  I  take  St.  Peter's  First 
*  ^  Epistle,  the  only  document  among  those  ranked  in 
the  early  Church  as  *  uncontroverted/  which  I  have  not  yet 
discussed.  At  the  end  of  the  second  century  there  was  such 
general  agreement  between  Christians  all  over  the  world  as 
to  the  bulk  of  the  books  which  they  venerated  as  sacred,  that 
in  the  preceding  lectures  I  have  had  very  little  occasion  to 
cite  authorities  later  than  the  very  beginning  of  the  third 
century.  On  this  account  I  have  not  hitherto  quoted  the 
passage  in  which  Eusebius  (iii.  25)  sums  up  his  views  as  to 
the  New  Testament  books ;  but  though  it  is  somewhat  later 
than  most  of  the  other  testimonies  with  which  we  have  to 
deal,  the  opinion  of  one  of  the  most  influential  critics  at  the 
beginning  of  the  fourth  century  is  too  important  to  be  passed 
over  in  silence.  You  will  find  the  passage  translated  and 
discussed  in  Westcott's  N.  T.  Canon,  p.  414.  Suffice  it  here 
to  say  that  Eusebius  makes  three  classes  of  Ecclesiastical 
books:  (i)  The  Generally  Accepted  Books  (o/xoAoyov/xera),  of 
which  he  enumerates  the  four  Gospels,  the  Acts,  the  Epistles 
of  Paul  (and  it  appears  from  another  passage  [iii.  3]  that  he 
counts  the  Hebrews  in  the  number),  the  former  Epistle  of 
John  and  that  of  Peter:  to  these  is  to  be  added,  if  at  least 
it  should  so  appear  (etye  <£ai/ei?7),  the  Apocalypse;  (2)  The 
Disputed  Btfoks  (dvrtXeyo/xeva),  which,  however,  are  well  known 
and  recognized  by  most  (yvcupt/xwv  o/x,o>s  roi?  TroAAois),  viz.  that 
which  is  called  James's,  that  of  Jude,  the  Second  Epistle  of 
Peter,  and  that  called  the  Second  and  Third  of  John,  whether 
they  belong  to  the  Evangelist  himself  or  to  a  namesake  of 
his  ;  (3)  The  Spurious  or  Rejected  Books  (v60a),  viz.  the  Acts  of 


47^  THE    FIRST    EPISTLE    OF   ST.    PETER.  [XXII. 

Paul,  the  Shepherd,  the  Revelation  of  Peter,  the  Epistle  of 
Barnabas,  the  so-called  Teachings  of  the  Apostles,  and  if 
it  should  so  appear  (et  <j>a.veirj},  the  Revelation  of  John,  which 
some  reject,  others  count  among  the  6/xoXoyov/xeva.  Some 
also  count  with  these  the  Gospel  according  to  the  Hebrews. 
Both  these  last  two  classes  Eusebius  includes  under  the 
general  title  of  Disputed  Books.  He  is  clearly  speaking  only 
of  books  in  use  among  orthodox  Churchmen  ;  for  he  goes  on 
to  speak  of  such  works  as  the  Gospels  of  Peter,  Thomas,  and 
Matthias,  the  Acts  of  Andrew,  John,  and  the  other  Apostles, 
which  he  condemns  as  heretical  forgeries,  and  as  not  deserv 
ing  to  count  even  among  the  voOa.  The  odd  thing  in  this 
classification  is,  that  he  mentions  difference  of  opinion  as  to 
the  Revelation  of  St.  John  ;  but  instead  of  then,  as  we  should 
expect,  classifying  this  among  the  disputed  books,  he  gives  his 
readers  the  choice  whether  to  place  it  among  the  '  accepted* 
or  the  '  spurious,'  himself  showing  a  leaning  to  the  latter 
verdict.  I  imagine  that  the  first  class  includes  the  books  which 
were  generally  accepted  in  Churches  without  any  feeling  of 
doubt ;  the  second  class  those  concerning  which  doubts  were 
entertained  ;  and  the  third  class  those  which  generally  were 
not  admitted  to  have  pretensions  to  Apostolic  authority.  I 
take  it  that  the  Apocalypse  was  received  without  hesitation  by 
so  many  Churches  that  Eusebius  felt  himself  bound  to  report 
its  claims  to  the  first  rank ;  but  that  he  himself,  following  the 
opinion  of  Dionysius  of  Alexandria  and  other  divines  whom 
he  respected,  was  disposed  to  place  it  in  the  third  class.  We 
are  a  little  surprised  to  find  no  mention  made  of  Clement's 
Epistle,  since  we  know  (Euseb.  iii.  16)  that  it  was  included 
in  the  public  reading  of  many  Churches,  as  its  place  in  the 
Alexandrian  MS.  testifies.  There  is  no  very  apparent  reason 
why  it  did  not  deserve  to  be  mentioned  as  well  as  the  Shepherd 
of  Hermas  or  the  Epistle  of  Barnabas  ;  so  that  I  feel  by  no 
means  sure  that  the  omission  was  not  mere  inadvertence.  If 
not,  the  best  explanation  we  can  give  is  that  Clement's 
Epistle  did  not  claim  to  proceed  from  an  Apostle,  like  one 
of  the  two  books  I  have  named,  or  to  contain  a  prophetic 
revelation  like  the  other. 

I  have  found  it  convenient  to  speak  here  about  this  list 


XXII.]  EUSEBIUS'S   LIST   OF   N.    T.    BOOKS.  477 

of  Eusebius  ;  but  we  are  not  immediately  concerned  with  the 
questions  I  have  touched  on  concerning  his  principles  of 
classification  ;  for  Peter's  Epistle  is  placed  by  him  unequi 
vocally  in  the  first  rank.  And  certainly  the  testimony  in  its 
favour  is  of  the  highest  character ;  indeed,  I  do  not  know 
that  any  New  Testament  Book  is  better  attested.  The  latest 
witnesses  with  whom  I  have  usually  begun,  Irenaeus,  Clement, 
and  Tertullian,*all  employ  it.  It  is  quoted  also  in  the  Epistle 
of  the  Churches  of  Vienne  and  Lyons.  It  was  included  in  the 
Syriac  and  in  the  old  Latin  versions.  Eusebius  (iv.  14)  has 
taken  notice  of  the  use  made  of  this  letter  in  the  Epistle  of 
Polycarp ;  and  this  Epistle  being  extant  enables  us  to  verify 
the  accuracy  of  the  report,  the  quotations  from  Peter  being 
extremely  numerous  ;  and  his  Epistle  being  more  frequently 
employed  by  Polycarp  than  any  other  New  Testament  Book. 
Clement  of  Alexandria  (Strom,  iv.  12)  quotes  a  passage  from 
the  heretic  Basilides,  in  which  the  influence  of  Peter's  Epistle 
is  distinctly  marked.  I  have  already  (p.  92)  spoken  of  the 
use  made  of  the  Epistle  by  Papias,  and  shall  presently  have 
a  few  words  more  to  say  on  the  same  subject.  There 
are  several  resemblances  to  First  Peter  both  in  Clement 
of  Rome  and  in  Hermas,  and  at  least  in  the  former 
case  I  think  they  deserve  to  be  regarded  as  quotations.  I 
myself  believe  that  the  stories  concerning  the  Redeemer's 
liberation  of  souls  from  Hades  which  early  acquired  so  great 
currency  f  were  suggested  by  i  Peter  iii.  19;  but  no  doubt 

*  Iren.  IV.  ix.  2,  xvi.  5  ;  Clem.  Alex.  Strom,  iv.  7  ;  Paed.  i.  6  ;  Hypotyp. 
p.  1006,  Potter  ;  see  also  Euseb.  vi.  14.  Tert.  Scorp.  12,  14;  De  Orat. 
20  ;  Adv.  Jud.  10. 

t  See  note,  p.  365.  In  some  of  the  Gnostic  systems  this  liberation  of 
souls  from  Hades  is  made  to  be  the  great  object  of  the  Redeemer's  death. 
Hades  is  deceived  into  regarding  the  Redeemer  as  one  of  the  ordinary 
dead,  and  so  admitting  the  Spoiler  who  was  to  depopulate  his  kingdom. 
This  was  the  theory  of  the  Marcionites,  described  by  Eznig  (see  Smith's 
Diet,  of  Christ.  Biog.  iii.  822),  and  of  the  Sethites  of  Hippolytus  (v.  19,  p. 
142,  Miller).  Several  orthodox  fathers  adopted  the  theory  of  a  deception 
suffered  by  the  devil  in  consequence  of  our  Lord's  humiliation  ;  whereby  he 
was  tempted  into  a  conflict  in  which  he  was  sure  to  be  worsted.  The  theory 
perhaps,  presents  itself  in  its  most  curious  form  in  Macarius  Magnes  (see  p. 
163),  who  says  that  our  Lord  ensnared  the  devil  by  baiting  the  hook  of  his 
divinity  with  the  worm  of  his  humanity ;  and  thus  expounds  the  text  (Ps. 
xxii.  6),  '  I  am  a  worm  and  no  man.'  But  in  this  exposition  Macarius  is  not 
original ;  for,  on  comparing  what  he  says  with  Origen's  Commentary  on 


478  THE   FIRST   EPISTLE   OF   ST.    PETER.  [XXII. 

this  is  only  matter  of  opinion.  However,  the  earliest  attes 
tation  to  Peter's  First  Epistle  is  that  given  in  the  Second 
(iii.  i) ;  for  those  who  deny  this  Second  Epistle  to  be  the 
work  of  Peter  acknowledge  that  it  is  a  very  early  docu 
ment  ;  and  if  it  be  a  forgery,  it  is  nevertheless  clear  that  there 
was  at  the  time  when  it  was  written,  an  Epistle  already  in 
circulation,  which  the  author  believed  to  be  Peter's,  on  the 
level  of  which  he  aspired  to  place  the  second  letter. 

The  external  attestation  to  the  Epistle  being  so  strong,  I 
attribute  no  importance  to  the  only  point  in  which  it  is  de 
fective,  viz.  that  the  Muratorian  Fragment  mentions  neither 
Epistle  of  Peter.  I  myself  believe  that  fragment  to  be  later 
than  Irenaeus  ;  but,  grant  it  the  greatest  antiquity  that  has 
been  claimed  for  it,  and  we  have  older  testimony  that  the 
First  Epistle  was  then  in  circulation.  I  cannot  but  think, 
therefore,  that  anyone  professing  to  give  a  list  of  New  Testa 
ment  books  would  have  been  sure  to  name  this  Epistle,  if  not 
for  approval,  at  least  for  rejection.  Now,  Westcott  (IV.  T. 
Canon,  Appendix  C.)  has  pointed  out  that  other  work  done 
by  the  scribe  to  whom  we  owe  the  preservation  of  this  frag 
ment  is  disfigured  by  hasty  errors  of  omission.  It  seems  to 
me  therefore  probable  that  a  sentence  has  been  accidentally 


the  same  text,  it  becomes  apparent  that  Macarius  is  drawing  from  Origen, 
who  no  doubt  served  as  an  authority  to  other  succeeding  fathers. 

On  the  other  hand,  it  is  fair  to  mention  the  curious  fact,  which  illustrates 
the  precarious  character  of  the  argument  from  silence  (see  p.  159),  that 
Irenaeus,  who  elsewhere  shows  that  he  was  acquainted  with  Peter's  Epistle, 
does  not  quote  it  in  connexion  with  the  doctrine  of  our  Lord's  descent 
to  hell.  His  chief  proof  of  that  doctrine  is  founded  on  a  supposed  Old 
Testament  passage,  which  he  cites  four  times  (ill.  xx.  3  ;  IV.  xxxiii.  I,  12; 
V.  xxxi.  i),  '  The  Lord  God  the  Holy  One  of  Israel  hath  remembered  his 
dead  which  lay  in  the  earth  of  the  grave,  and  he  descended  to  them  that  he 
might  proclaim  to  them  his  salvation.'  This  passage  had  also  been  cited 
by  Justin  Martyr  (Trypho,  72),  who  attributes  it  to  Jeremiah,  and  accuses 
the  Jews  of  having  cut  it  out  of  their  copies.  This  interpolation  has  close 
affinity  with  2  Esdras  ii.  31.  The  other  passages  which  Irenaeus  (v.  xxxi.) 
cites  in  proof  of  the  doctrine  are  Matt.  xii.  40,  Eph.  iv.  9,  Pss.  Ixxxvi.  13, 
xxiii.  4.  Tertullian  also  (De  Anima,  55)  omits  to  cite  I  Peter;  but  it  is 
easy  to  see  that  in  this  place  he  is  following  Irenseus.  The  passage  of 
Peter  is  used  by  Clement  Alex.  (Strom,  vi.  6).  Hermas  (Sim.  ix.  16)  has 
a  notion  peculiar  to  himself,  that  the  Apostles  descending  to  Hades  not 
only  preached  to  those  who  had  died  before  them,  but  there  baptized 
those  so  evangelized.  On  this  subject  may  further  be  consulted  Lightfoot's 
note  (p.  131)  on  Ignat.  ad  Magn.  9. 


XXII.]    INTERNAL   DIFFICULTIES    ALLEGED   AGAINST    IT.       479 

left  out,  in  which  the  Petrine  Epistles  were  spoken  of.  The 
omission  is  to  be  regretted,  not  as  regards  the  First  Epistle, 
concerning  which  we  have  other  abundant  evidence,  but  as 
depriving  us  of  some  important  guidance  in  our  judgment 
about  the  Second.  For  the  omission  of  mention  of  it  in  that 
fragment  is  a  fact  which  has  no  weight,  when  the  First  Epistle 
also  is  not  noticed. 

I  come  now  to  the  internal  difficulties  which  have  been 
alleged  to  warrant  the  rejection  of  so  much  external  evidence. 
And  first  we  must  notice  the  indication  of  advanced  date 
afforded  by  the  fact  that,  when  this  Epistle  was  written,  the 
Christians  as  such  were  subject  to  legal  penalties.  When 
Paul  wrote  to  the  Romans,  he  could  tell  them  (xiii.  3)  that 
rulers  were  'not  a  terror  to  good  works,  but  to  the  evil ;'  that 
they  need  not  be  afraid  of  the  power ;  for  if  they  did  that 
which  was  good  they  should  have  praise  of  the  same,  '  for 
he  is  the  minister  of  God  to  thee  for  good.'  Paul's  own 
experience,  when  brought  before  Gallic  (Acts  xviii.  14),  had 
taught  him  that  a  man,  against  whom  no  charge  of  '  wrong 
or  wicked  villany'  could  be  laid,  would  be  protected  by  the 
Roman  magistrate  against  an  attempt  to  punish  him  merely 
on  account  of  his  religious  opinions.  But  Peter's  Epistle 
contemplates  a  state  of  things  when  innocence  was  no  pro 
tection,  when  a  man  might  do  well  and  suffer  for  it  (ii.  20). 
The  name  Christian  had  become  a  title  of  accusation  (iv.  16); 
and  a  main  object  with  the  writer  is  to  animate  his  disciples' 
courage  to  endure  a  '  fiery  trial '  coming  on  them  solely  on 
account  of  their  religion.  It  has  been  assumed  that  it  was 
the  Emperor  Trajan's  rescript  in  answer  to  Pliny  which  first 
made  the  profession  of  Christianity  illegal,  and  so,  that  Peter's 
Epistle  cannot  be  dated  earlier  than  that  emperor's  reign. 
But  Trajan  did  no  more  than  sanction  the  line  of  action  Pliny 
had  taken  before  he  consulted  him ;  and  it  is  plain  from 
Pliny's  letter  that  the  state  of  things  he  found  existing  when 
he  entered  upon  office  was  that  Christians  as  such  were  liable 
to  be  punished.  Pliny  states  that  he  had  never  been  present 
at  trials  of  Christians,  and  consequently  was  puzzled  how  to 
conduct  them.  He  was  himself  desirous  to  take  a  merciful 
view  ;  and  as  he  could  find  no  evidence  that  Christians  had 


480  THE    FIRST   EPISTLE   OF   ST.    PETER.  [XXII. 

been  guilty  of  any  immorality,  he  wished  that  men  should  not 
be  punished  for  the  past  offence  of  having  belonged  to  the 
prohibited  sect,  provided  they  were  willing  to  withdraw  from 
connexion  with  it  in  the  future.  But  he  had  no  doubt  of  the 
propriety  of  punishing  those  who  contumaciously  refused  to 
abandon  their  Christian  profession.  It  is  therefore  quite  clear 
that,  if  we  wish  to  name  the  time  when  Christianity  became 
a  prohibited  religion,  we  must  assign  an  earlier  date  than 
Trajan's  reign.  To  me  it  seems  that  the  most  probable  date 
is  64,  the  year  of  Nero's  persecution  ;  and  therefore,  though  I 
see  nothing  inconsistent  with  Petrine  authorship  in  the  fact 
that  when  the  Epistle  was  written  Christians  were  liable  to 
be  punished  as  such,  I  think  that  this  fact  forbids  us  to  date 
the  letter  earlier  in  Peter's  life  than  the  year  of  the  burning  of 
Rome.* 

I  have  already  more  than  once  had  occasion  to  mention 
the  chief  cause  of  opposition  to  Peter's  Epistle.  Those  who, 
with  Baur,  accept  the  Clementine  Homilies  as  revealing  the 
true  history  of  the  early  Church,  learn  to  think  of  Peter  as  an 
Ebionite  in  doctrine,  and  as  permanently  in  antagonism  to 
Paul.  But  the  Peter  of  this  Epistle  teaches  doctrine  which 
has  the  closest  affinity  with  that  of  Paul,  and  even  adopts  a 
good  deal  of  that  Apostle's  language.  I  will  not  repeat  the 
arguments  I  have  already  used  to  show  the  Clementines  to  be 
wholly  undeserving  of  the  credence  Baur  has  given  to  their 
representations,  and  it  is  the  less  needful  to  do  so  because 
there  are  manifest  indications  that  Baur's  theory  is  dying  out. 
In  Germany,  scholars  who  would  think  it  an  affront  to  be 
classed  as  apologists,  such  as  Pfleiderer,  Weizsacker,  Keim, 
retreat  from  his  extreme  positions.  Renan  accepts  Peter's 
Epistle,  refusing  to  count  its  conciliatory  tendencies  as  a 
decisive  objection,  and  says  (UAnttckri$t%  p.  ix.) :  '  If  the 
hatred  between  the  two  parties  of  primitive  Christianity  had 
been  so  profound  as  the  school  of  Baur  believes,  the  recon 
ciliation  could  never  have  been  made.' 

*  Lightfoot  remarks  (Ignat.  i.  u)  that  it  was  not  necessary  that  any 
formal  edict  against  the  Christians  should  have  been  issued.  The  mere 
negative  fact  that  their  religion  had  not  been  recognized  as  lawful  would 
have  been  ample  justification  for  proceeding  against  them  as  soon  as  it  was 
recognized  that  Christianity  was  something  distinct  from  Judaism. 


XXII.]  ITS   PAULINISM.  481 

One  who,  as  Renan  does,  accepts  the  tradition  that  the 
letter  was  written  from  Rome,  cannot  reasonably  be  surprised 
at  its  Paulinism.  Peter  was  not  one  of  those  rugged  charac 
ters  whom  it  costs  nothing  to  be  out  of  harmony  with  their 
surroundings  ;  who,  living  much  in  their  own  thoughts,  arrive 
at  conclusions  which  they  hold  so  strongly  as  to  have  power 
to  force  them  on  unwilling  ears.  Peter,  on  the  contrary, 
possessed  an  eminently  sympathetic  nature.  He  was  one 
who  received  impressions  easily,  and  could  not,  without  an 
effort,  avoid  reflecting  the  tone  of  the  company  in  which 
he  lived.  I  need  only  remind  you  of  what  the  Epistle  to  the 
Galatians  tells  of  Peter's  conduct  at  Antioch  ;  how  readily 
he  conformed  to  the  usage  of  the  Pauline  Christians  of  that 
city,  but,  on  the  arrival  of  visitors  from  Palestine,  fell  back 
into  the  Jewish  practice.  What  business  should  Peter  have 
at  Rome  if  in  his  mind  Christianity  were  still  but  a  re 
formed  sect  of  Judaism,  and  if  he  had  not  risen  to  the 
conception  of  a  universal  Church  ?  And  how  could  he  live 
in  a  Church,  so  many  of  whose  members  owed  their  know 
ledge  of  the  Gospel  to  Paul's  preaching,  without  sympathizing 
with  the  honour  in  which  the  work  of  the  Apostle  of  the 
Gentiles  was  held  ?  Was  the  man  who  did  not  hold  aloof 
from  Paul's  company  at  Antioch,  when  the  idea  of  the  ad 
mission  of  Gentiles  to  equal  privileges  was  still  a  novelty 
offensive  to  Jewish  minds,  likely  to  play  the  part  of  a  separatist 
at  Rome,  after  Gentile  Christianity  had  established  its  full 
rights  not  only  there  but  in  so  many  cities  of  the  Empire  ? 

There  has,  indeed,  been  a  good  deal  of  controversy  as  to 
the  place  of  composition  of  the  Epistle.  I  need  hardly  re 
mind  you  that  at  the  close  (v.  13)  a  salutation  is  sent  from 
'  the  Church  that  is  at  Babylon,  elected  together  with  you.' 
The  early  Church  generally  understood  that  Babylon  here 
was  a  mystical  name  for  Rome  ;  but  many  moderns  take  the 
word  in  its  literal  and  obvious  sense  as  denoting  Babylon 
on  the  Euphrates,  a  place  which  was  the  centre  of  a  con 
siderable  Jewish  population,  as  Josephus  and  Philo  bear 
witness.*  I  will  not  trouble  myself  to  discuss  a  third  theory 

*  Joseph.  Antt.  xv.  3,  I  ;  Philo,  De  legat.  ad  Caiutnt  p.  1023. 
2  I 


482  THE    FIRST    EPISTLE    OF   ST.    PETER.  [XXII. 

which  finds  an  Egyptian  Babylon.  The  connexion  of  Peter 
with  Rome  has  been  so  much  insisted  on  by  Roman  Catho 
lics,  that  Protestants  have  thought  it  a  duty  to  deny  it; 
and  thus  there  is  a  certain  number  of  commentators  whose 
views  have  been  so  biassed,  one  way  or  other,  by  the  effect 
their  decision  may  have  on  modern  controversies,  that  their 
opinion  deserves  to  go  for  nothing.  For  my  part,  I  so  utterly 
disbelieve  in  any  connexion  between  Peter  and  Leo  XIII., 
that  I  count  a  man  as  only  half  a  Protestant  if  he  troubles  his 
head  about  the  Romish  controversy  when  he  is  discussing 
the  personal  history  of  Peter.  One  might  expect  to  find  un 
prejudiced  judges  in  men  so  advanced  in  their  opinions  that 
they  ought  to  be  sublimely  indifferent  to  controversies  between 
one  sect  of  Christians  and  another.  Yet  it  is  curious  how  the 
scent  of  the  roses  will  cling  to  the  fragments  of  the  shattered 
vase.  Thus,  Comte's  Positive  Religion,  though  not  Christian, 
or  even  Theistic,  retains  a  strong  Roman  Catholic  com 
plexion.  Accordingly,  on  the  present  question  Renan  adheres 
to  the  view  in  which  he  had  been  brought  up,  and  takes 
Babylon  to  mean  Rome ;  while  Lipsius,  and  other  German 
divines,  who  hold  the  opposite  opinion,  appear  to  me  not 
free  from  anti-Romish  bias.  I  think  that  any  critic  who 
puts  the  Epistle  down  to  the  reign  of  Trajan  ought  to  feel 
no  difficulty  in  taking  Babylon  to  mean  Rome  :  for  by  the 
time  of  that  Emperor's  reign  the  Apocalypse  must  have  had 
large  circulation,  and  might  well  have  influenced  Christian 
phraseology;  and  in  that  book  Babylon  unquestionably  denotes 
Rome.  But  for  us  who  maintain  an  earlier  date  for  the  Epistle, 
the  question  is  not  so  easy  of  decision.  For  then  we  must 
hold  that  it  was  St.  Peter  who  set  the  first  example  of  this  way 
of  speaking  ;  and  as  his  letter  is  not  a  mystical  book  like  the 
Apocalypse,  it  is  natural  for  us  to  ask,  If  the  Apostle  meant 
Rome,  why  did  he  not  say  Rome  ?  On  the  other  hand,  the 
evidence  that  Babylon  was  the  centre  of  a  large  Jewish  popu 
lation  relates  to  a  date  somewhat  earlier  than  the  time  of  this 
Epistle.  For  Josephus  relates  (Antt.  xviii.  9)  that  in  the  reign 
of  Caligula,  the  Jews,  partly  on  account  of  persecutions  from 
their  neighbours,  partly  on  account  of  a  pestilence,  removed 
in  great  numbers  from  Babylon  to  the  new  and  rising  city  of 


XXII.]  ITS    PLACE    OF   COMPOSITION.  483 

Seleucia,  about  forty  miles  distant.  And  there  new  quarrels 
arose,  in  which  the  greater  part  of  the  Jews,  to  the  number  of 
50,000  were  slain.  Thus  it  would  appear  that  at  the  date  of 
the  Epistle  there  was  no  Jewish  colony  in  Babylon  ;  and  so 
Peter's  journey  to  that  city,  which  in  any  case  would  be  a 
little  surprising,  becomes  quite  unaccountable. 

The  most  trustworthy  tradition  makes  the  West,  not  the 
East,  the  scene  of  Peter's  labours.  The  passage  in  which 
Eusebius  speaks  (ii.  15)  of  the  verse  about  Babylon  is  worth 
attention  on  account  of  the  two  earlier  writers  whom  he  cites. 
Eusebius  tells  that  Peter's  hearers  had  begged  his  disciple 
Mark  to  give  them  a  written  record  of  the  Apostle's  teaching, 
and  that  in  compliance  with  this  request  the  Gospel  according 
to  St.  Mark  was  composed.  And  he  goes  on, 'It  is  said  (</>acrt) 
that  when  the  Apostle  knew  what  had  been  done  (for  the 
Spirit  revealed  it  to  him),  he  was  pleased  by  the  eager  zeal  of 
the  men,  and  gave  his  sanction  to  the  writing  for  use  in  the 
Churches  (Clement  has  recorded  the  story  in  the  6th  book  of 
his  Hypotyposeis,  and  Papias,  Bishop  of  Hierapolis,  gives  like 
testimony)  ;  and  that  Peter  makes  mention  of  Mark  in  his 
First  Epistle,  which  it  is  also  said  that  he  composed  in  Rome, 
and  that  he  himself  intimates  this,  by  giving  the  city  the 
metaphorical  name  of  Babylon.'  Now,  Eusebius  elsewhere 
(vi.  14)  quotes  the  passage  from  the  Hypotyposeis,  telling  the 
same  story  as  to  the  origin  of  St. Mark's  Gospel;  but  with 
this  difference,  that  when  Peter  heard  what  had  been  done, 
he  neither  approved  nor  disapproved.  It  is  natural  to  suspect 
that  the  parts  in  the  passage  I  have  just  cited  which  do  not 
appear  to  rest  on  Clement's  authority  were  derived  by  Eusebius 
from  the  other  writer  whom  he  cites,  Papias.  Now,  the  words, 
'  as  I  said,'  in  the  passage  of  Papias  cited,  p.  92,  show  that 
there  was  a  previous  passage  in  which  he  had  spoken  of  the 
relations  between  Peter  and  Mark.  And  as  Eusebius  further 
states  that  Papias  quoted  the  First  Epistle  of  Peter,  the  pro 
bability  rises  very  high  that  the  passage  quoted  was  the  verse 
(v.  13)  which  in  the  above  extract  Eusebius  brings  into  such 
close  connexion  with  the  name  of  Papias.  If  this  be  so,  we 
could  not  have  higher  authority  for  interpreting  '  Babylon'  in 
that  verse  to  mean  Rome  ;  both  because  Papias  lived  before 

2  I  2 


484  THE    FIRST    EPISTLE   OF   ST.    PETER.  [XXII. 

the  invention  of  the  Clementine  legend,  and  because  his 
authority,  John  the  Elder,  was  one  likely  to  be  well  in 
formed. 

It  must  be  added,  that  if  the  scene  of  Peter's  activity  were 
on  the  Euphrates  at  so  late  a  period  as  that  which  I  have 
assigned  to  his  Epistle,  it  is  unlikely  that  he  should  be  found 
so  soon  afterwards  suffering  martyrdom  at  Rome.  But  the 
Roman  martyrdom  of  Peter  is  very  well  attested.  We  gather 
from  John  (xxi.  12)  that  Peter  did  suffer  martyrdom;  and  no 
other  city  claims  to  have  been  the  place.  At  the  beginning 
of  the  third  century,  Tertullian  (De  Praescrip.  36,  Scorp.  15), 
and  Caius  (Euseb.  ii.  25)  have  no  doubt  that  it  was  at  Rome 
he  suffered.  And  Caius  (see  p.  377)  states  further  that  there 
were  '  trophies,'  by  which,  I  suppose,  we  are  to  understand 
tombs  or  memorial  churches,  marking  the  spots  sacred  to  the 
memory  of  the  Apostles.  Now  it  is  reasonable  to  think  that 
these  could  not  have  been  of  very  recent  erection  when  Caius 
wrote.  The  testimony  of  Dionysius  of  Corinth,  also  quoted 
by  Eusebius  in  the  chapter  just  cited,  gives  us  reason  to 
believe  that  some  time  before  the  end  of  the  second  cen 
tury  the  Christian  world  generally  acknowledged  the  Roman 
martyrdom. 

If  we  are  to  understand  that  Peter  gave  to  Rome  the  name 
of  Babylon,  we  have  an  additional  reason  for  assigning  to  the 
Epistle  a  late  date  in  Peter's  life.  Such  a  name  would  not 
be  given  until  Rome  had,  by  its  persecution  of  the  Church, 
come  to  be  regarded  by  Christians  as  the  true  successor  of 
the  tyrant  city  which  oppressed  the  Church  of  the  elder 
dispensation. 

The  question  next  comes  under  consideration,  For  what 
readers  was  the  Epistle  intended  ?  The  opening  address 
recalls  the  Epistle  of  James,  a  document  which  I  shall 
presently  give  reasons  to  think  was  known  to  Peter.  The 
letter  of  James  is  addressed  '  to  the  twelve  tribes  which  are  of 
the  Dispersion '  (rat?  ev  rfj  Siacnropa),  a  phrase  by  which  we 
readily  understand  Jews  living  outside  the  limits  of  the  Holy 
Land.  St.  Peter's  Epistle  is  addressed  to  the  elect  who  are 
sojourners  of  the  Dispersion  in  Pontus,  Galatia,  Cappadocia, 
Asia,  and  Bithynia  (e/cAeKTois  irapcTrtSiyftois  Siao-Tropas) ;  but  on 


XXII.]  FOR   WHAT    READERS    INTENDED  ?  485 

examination  we  find  that  in  this  case  the  'Dispersion'  does 
not  consist  exclusively,  or  even  principally,  of  Jews.  The 
persons  addressed  had  been  '  called  out  of  darkness  into 
God's  marvellous  light :'  in  times  past  they  '  had  not  been  a 
people,  but  were  now  the  people  of  God  '  (ii.  9,  10).  In  this 
verse  a  passage  of  Hosea  is  made  use  of  which  Paul  had 
employed  (Rom.  ix.  25)  with  reference  to  the  calling  of  the 
Gentiles.  The  unconverted  days  of  those  addressed  had 
been  days  of '  ignorance'  (i.  14),  days  when  they  had  '  wrought 
the  will  of  the  Gentiles'  (iv.  3).  It  may  be  inferred  from 
these  expressions  that  the  persons  addressed  are  not  Jews  ; 
and  yet  are  not  permanent  residents  in  the  countries  ad 
dressed,  but  for  some  reason  '  dispersed'  among  them.  I  do 
not  lay  stress  upon  the  word  TrapeTriSij/Aois  as  proving  that 
those  addressed  were  but  temporary  sojourners  where  they 
dwelt ;  for  the  thought  was  constantly  present  to  the  minds 
of  Christians  that  they  were  but '  strangers  and  pilgrims'  upon 
earth  (£eVot  /cat  irapcrrtSrjuoi,  Heb.  xi.  13  :  see  also  Lightfoot's 
note  on  the  address  of  the  Epistle  of  Clement  of  Rome).  It 
is  possible  that  the  word  St.a.(nropd  may  also  be  used  here  in  a 
metaphorical  sense,  the  Christians  scattered  among  the  world 
of  heathen  being  regarded  as  a  spiritual  Israel  dispersed 
among  the  Gentiles.  But  I  feel  much  inclined  to  take  the 
word  literally,  and  to  believe  that  Peter's  letter  was  written  to 
members  of  the  Roman  Church  whom  Nero's  persecution  had 
dispersed  to  seek  safety  in  the  provinces,  Asia  Minor  being 
by  no  means  an  unlikely  place  for  them  to  flee  to.* 

I  have  already  had  occasion  to  express  my  opinion  that 
the  Paulinism  of  Peter's  Epistle  proceeds  beyond  identity  of 
doctrine,  and  is  such  as  to  show  that  Peter  had  read  some  of 
Paul's  letters.  In  particular,  the  proofs  of  his  acquaintance 
with  the  Epistle  to  the  Romans  are  so  numerous  and  striking 
as  to  leave  no  doubt  on  my  mind.  I  have  just  referred  to  the 
use  in  both  Epistles  of  the  same  verse  from  Hosea ;  so,  in 
like  manner,  both  combine  in  the  same  way  the  verses,  Isaiah 
viii.  14,  and  xxviii.  16,  'Behold  I  lay  in  Sion  a  stumbling- 

*  An  interesting  paper,  taking  this  view,  was  published  by  Dr.  Quarry- 
in  the  Journal  of  Sacred  Literature,  Jan.  1861.  The  use  made  by  Peter 
of  the  Epistle  to  the  Romans  is  dwelt  on  in  the  same  paper. 


486  THE    FIRST   EPISTLE   OF   ST.    PETER.  [XXII. 

stone  and  rock  of  offence,  and  whosoever  believeth  on  him 
shall  not  be  ashamed'  (Rom.  ix.  33,  i  Pet.  ii.  6-8).  There 
are  many  passages  where  there  are  distinct  verbal  coinci 
dences,  and  especially  in  the  directions  to  obedience  to  the 
civil  rulers.* 

There  are  isolated  coincidences  with  other  Pauline  Epistles 
(compare,  for  instance,  ii.  16,  with  Gal.  v.  13  ;  v.  8,  with  i 
Thess.  v.  6  ;  v.  14,  with  i  Cor.  xvi.  20).  But  it  is  with  the 
Epistle  to  the  Ephesians  that  the  affinity  is  closest.  A  great 
many  critics — Holtzmann,  Seufert,  Renan — have  convinced 
themselves  that  it  is  such  as  to  prove  that  Peter  must  have 
used  that  Epistle,  and  I  had  myself  accepted  that  conclusion. 
I  still  hold  it :  though  now  that  I  come  to  lay  the  proofs 
before  you,  I  have  to  own  that  they  are  by  no  means  so 
demonstrative  as  I  count  them  to  be  in  the  case  of  the 
Epistle  to  the  Romans.  There  are  several  passages  in 
Peter's  Epistle  which  so  strongly  remind  us  of  passages  in 
the  Epistle  to  the  Ephesians,  that  the  simplest  explanation 
of  their  origin  is  that  they  were  suggested  to  the  writer 
by  his  knowledge  of  Paul's  Epistle.  But  the  resemblance 
is  often  merely  in  the  thoughts,  or  in  the  general  plan, 
without  any  exact  reproduction  of  the  words.  We  might 
conjecturally  explain  this  difference  by  supposing  the  Epistle 
to  the  Romans  to  have  been  so  long  known  to  St.  Peter 
that  he  had  had  time  to  become  familiar  with  its  language, 
while  his  acquaintance  with  the  Ephesian  Epistle  was  more 
recent. 

Comparing,  then,  Peter's  Epistle  with  that  to  the  Ephesians, 

*  vTTordynTt  /3cc<nAe?  us  inrtptxovri  (I  Pet.  ii.  13) ; 

iraffa  tyvx^  t£ov<riats  uTrepexoucrais  virorafffftffdu  (Rom.  xiii.  I). 
tls  fKSiKi]ffiv  KaKoirotuv  (i  Pet.  ii.  14)  ; 
tKtiiKos  tls  bpy$}v  T<f  rb  Aca/c&i/  irpaacrovTi  (Rom.  xiii.  4). 
tiraivov  5e  ayaOoiroicav  (l  Pet.  ii.  14) ; 
rb  ayaQbv  iroiti  Kal  t£tis  eiraivov  (Rom.  xiii.  3). 
I  Peter  iii.  8,  9,  is  an  abridgment  of  Rom.  xii.  IO,  13-16. 
irdvTts    6/u.6(ppovts,    Taireiv6(ppot>es,    <pi\d8t\<}>oi,    ^    airo$iS 
o.vr\  KaKov,  rovvavriov  Se  tv\oyovvrfs  (l  Pet.); 

T&  avrb  tls  a.\\-fi\ovs  (ppovovvTts,  /*)]   ra   wiJ/TjAck   <f>povovVTts 
rairtivo'is  ffvva.-rray6fj.tvoi,  TTJ  (pt\aSt\<f>ia  tls  a\\-f)\ous  <f)t\6ffropyoit 
KaKbv  avrl  KUKOV  eiTro5i5<Wes,  tv\oyt'iTf  Kal  ^  KarapaffOt  (Rom.). 

Compare  also  Rom.  xii.  6,  7,  with  i  Pet.  iv.  10,  ii.     Observe  how  the 
of  Rom.  xii.  2  is  reproduced  in  I  Pet.  i.  14  (the  word  not 


XXII.]  ITS   COINCIDENCES   WITH    EPHESIANS.  487 

we  find  that  after  the  address,  both  begin  with  *  Blessed  be 
the  God  and  Father  of  our  Lord  Jesus  Christ ; '  but  the  fact 
that  this  is  also  the  commencement  of  2  Cor.  weakens  the 
force  of  this  coincidence,  and  the  continuation  in  Eph.  and 
i  Pet.  is  quite  different — 6  cvAoyrjo-as  ^/xas  in  the  one  case,  6 
arayewi7o-as  17/x.as  in  the  other.  Again,  in  the  opening  of 
Peter's  Epistle  we  have  e/cXcKTOts  .  .  .  Kara  Trpoyvaxriv  $eoG 
Trarpos  ei/  ayiao~/x<p  Trvev/aaros  cts  .  .  .  pavricr/xov  at/xaros  I.  X. 
In  that  of  Ephesians  K<x0a)s  e£eAe£aTo  ^/xas  .  .  .  emu  ^juas 
ayiovs  .  .  .  ev  (3  e^o/>t€V  rrjv  aTroAvrpwoHV  Sta  TOV  cu/x,aTO?  avrou. 
There  is  here  considerable  resemblance  in  the  thoughts ;  but 
when  the  passages  are  compared  in  full  there  is  found  to  be 
a  good  deal  of  diversity  in  the  language.  The  style  of  the 
opening  of  the  two  Epistles  is  much  alike.  Each  begins 
with  a  very  long  sentence,  Eph.  i.  3-14,  i  Pet.  i.  3-12,  the 
clauses  being  connected  alternately  by  participles  and  relative 
pronouns. 

If  we  compare  i  Pet.  i.  20,  10-12,  with  Eph.  i.  4,  iii.  9-11, 
we  have  the  same  doctrine  of  a  mystery  ordained  of  God  irpb 
Ka.Ta/3o\rjs  KOCT/XOV,  kept  secret  from  former  generations  but  now 
fully  revealed,  and  exciting  the  interest  even  of  the  angelic 
host.  Christ's  exaltation  above  the  angels  is  spoken  of  i  Pet. 
iii.  22,  Eph.  i.  20-22.  Both  Epistles  contain  practical  ad 
monitions  to  Christians  as  to  their  duties  in  the  several 
relations  of  life ;  but  except  in  the  directions  to  wives  to 
be  subject  to  their  husbands,  and  slaves  to  their  masters, 
there  is  very  little  similarity  between  those  parts  of  the  two 

occurring  elsewhere  in  the  N.  T.)  ;  and  note  the  similarity  of  the  thoughts, 
Rom.  xii.  i,  i  Pet.  ii.  5. 

6  iradcav  €V  <rapKl  irtiravrai  a/J-aprias  (i  Pet.  iv.  i); 

6  yap  airodavwv  SeSt/ccuwrou  a7r&  TT/S  afj.aprias  (Rom.  iv.  7). 

'b  Koivavf'iTf  ro'is  TOV  xPl<rT°v  TraO^/naffiv,  xatVCT€  ^a  Ka^  **  rfi  O-^OKO- 
TTJV  S^TJS  O.VTOV  xapfjre  (I  Pet.  iv.  13)  ; 
rrov,  ffafp  ffvfjLirdffxofJiev  '(va.  Kal  (rvv$o£a.<rQufj.€V  (Rom.  viii.  17). 

ruv  TOV  XPHTTOV  TTa.drjiJ.drui',  6  Kal  TT}$  /j.e\\ov<rr]S  aTroKa\virTeffdai 
$6j-r]s  Koiviav6s  (l  Pet.  v.  i)  ; 

TaifaQi]iJ.ara  rov  vvv  Kaipov  irpbs  T^V  p.4\\ovffav  5d|ov  a.iroKa\v<pQrivai  els 
jLas  (Rom.  viii.  18). 

These  are  only  a  few  of  the  more  striking  coincidences,  but  the  list  might 
be  greatly  enlarged  if  we  included  several  where  the  same  thoughts  are 
expressed  with  variations  of  language.  See  Seufert  in  Hilgenfeld's  Zeit- 
schrift,  1874,  p.  360. 


488  THE    FIRST    EPISTLE    OF   ST.    PETER.  [XXII. 

Epistles.  In  both  i  Pet.  ii.  4-7  and  Eph.  ii.  20-22,  we  have 
the  comparison  of  the  Christian  society  to  a  building  of  which 
each  individual  member  is  a  living  stone  and  Christ  the  chief 
corner-stone:  but  St.  Peter  is  citing  Ps.  cxviii.  22,  and  Isaiah 
xxviii.  16;  and  the  former  passage  may  have  suggested  to 
Paul  also  the  comparison  of  the  corner-stone.  It  is  to  be 
noted  that  this  passage  from  the  Psalms  had  been  applied  by 
our  Lord  to  Himself  (Matt.  xxi.  42),  and  is  similarly  cited  by 
St.  Peter  (Acts  iv.  1 1 ).  Other  coincidences  are  the  K/OVTTTOS  TTJS 
KapSias av#pa>7ros  (i  Pet.  iii.  4)  with  the  lo-w  avfyxoTros  (Eph.  iii. 
1 6);  Iva  i7/xas  Trpoora.ya.yri  TW  0ea>  (i  Pet.  iii.  1 8)  with  BC  avrov 
e^o/xci/  rrjv  7rpocraya)yr)v  TT/JOS  TOV  Trarepa  (Eph.  ii.  I  8)  ;  and  the 
passage  about  Christ's  descent  to  hell  (i  Pet.  iii.  19,  20)  with 
Eph.  iv.  8-10.  The  coincidences  I  have  described  have  been 
accepted  by  many  critics  as  proofs  that  the  one  Epistle  was 
used  by  the  writer  of  the  other;  Hilgenfeld,  however,  main 
taining  that  it  is  Ephesians  which  is  indebted  to  i  Peter. 
Numerous  and  striking  as  these  coincidences  are,  still  when 
they  are  compared  with  those  between  i  Peter  and  the 
Epistle  to  the  Romans,  the  verbal  agreement  in  the  latter 
case  is  found  to  be  so  much  closer  that  a  good  deal  of  doubt 
is  cast  upon  the  assertion  that  the  former  case  is  one  of 
literary  obligation.  Lately  Seufert  (Hilgenfeld's  Zcitschnftt 
1 88 1,  p.  179)  has  offered  a  new  and  rather  startling  explana 
tion.  He  accounts  for  the  similarity  between  i  Peter  and 
Ephesians  as  we  account  for  that  between  Ephesians  and 
Colossians,  viz.  that  one  document  was  not  copied  from  the 
other,  but  that  both  had  the  same  author ;  and  of  course  in 
this  case  that  author  could  be  neither  Peter  nor  Paul.  I 
could  point  out  a  very  formidable  array  of  difficulties  in  the 
way  of  this  hypothesis ;  but  I  will  not  spend  time  in  refuting 
a  theory  which  has  not  as  yet  gained  adherents,  and  probably 
will  never  do  so.  The  resemblances  between  i  Peter  and 
Ephesians  are  very  much  less  numerous  and  less  striking 
than  those  between  Ephesians  and  Colossians ;  but  in  order 
to  establish  Seufert's  theory  they  ought  to  be  very  much 
stronger:  for  we  clearly  can  more  readily  recognize  resem 
blances  as  tokens  of  common  authorship  in  the  case  of  two 
documents  which  purport  to  come  from  the  same  author,  and 


XXII.]  ITS   COINCIDENCES   WITH    EPHESIANS.  489 

which  from  the  very  earliest  times  have  been  accepted  as  so 
coming,  than  when  the  case  is  just  the  reverse.  So  Seufert 
chiefly  aims  at  establishing  his  theory  by  showing  that  the 
resemblances  between  the  two  Epistles  cannot  be  accounted 
for  either  by  accident,  or  by  the  hypothesis  that  one  writer 
borrowed  from  the  other.  But  there  is  a  third  explanation 
which  in  my  opinion  ought  not  to  be  left  wholly  out  of 
account.  Peter  may  have  arrived  at  Rome  before  Paul 
quitted  it,  in  which  case  there  would  be  a  good  deal  of 
viva  voce  intercourse  between  the  Apostles,  as  there  had 
been  in  former  times.  The  doctrines  taught  by  Paul  in  his 
Epistle  to  the  Ephesians  would  also  naturally  be  the  subject 
of  his  discourses  to  the  Christians  at  Rome  :  and  these  dis 
courses  may  have  been  heard  by  Peter.  Having  this  expla 
nation  to  fall  back  upon,  if  Peter's  direct  use  of  the  Epistle 
to  the  Ephesians  were  disproved,  I  find  little  to  tempt  me  in 
Seufert's  hypothesis. 

I  have  still  to  mention  another  fact  establishing  how  com 
pletely  this  Epistle  ignores  all  dissensions  between  Pauline 
and  Jewish  Christianity.  This  writer,  who  shows  such  strong 
tokens  of  the  influence  of  Paul,  equally  exhibits  traces  of 
the  influence  of  the  Epistle  of  James.  This  phenomenon 
presents  no  difficulty  to  one  who  has  accepted  the  Church 
tradition  that  Peter  was  the  writer,  and  that  Peter  was  on 
terms  of  close  intimacy  and  friendship  both  with  the  head 
of  the  Church  of  Jerusalem  and  with  the  Apostle  of  the 
Gentiles.  But  on  Baur's  theory  it  is  difficult  to  believe  that 
a  Roman  Paulinist  of  the  age  of  Trajan  would  have  been  a 
diligent  student  and  admirer  of  the  specially  Jewish  Epistle. 
The  proofs  of  the  use  by  Peter  of  the  Epistle  of  James  are 
sufficiently  decisive.  The  phrases  Trct/moy-tots  TTOIKI'AOIS  and 
TO  BoKifuov  v/xcov  T??S  TrtVTecos  (James  i.  3,  4)  are  repeated 
in  i  Pet.  i.  7.  The  quotation  from  Prov.  iii.  34,  '  God  re- 
sisteth  the  proud,  but  giveth  grace  to  the  humble/  is 
made  in  James  iv.  6  and  i  Pet.  v.  5  with  the  same  varia 
tion  from  the  text  of  the  LXX.  (0eo's  instead  of  Kvptos),  and 
is  followed  in  both  places  by  the  same  exhortation,  '  Humble 
yourselves  therefore  that  God  may  exalt  you.'  Another 
citation  from  Prov.  x.  12,  'shall  cover  a  multitude  of  sins/ 


49°  THE   FIRST    EPISTLE   OF   ST.    PETER.  [XXII. 

is  also  common  to  the  two  Epistles  ;  and  the  phrase  of 
Isaiah  (xi.  7),  e^ypdvOrj  6  ^6pro<s  /cat  TO  avOos  e^€7T€(re,  quoted 
by  Peter,  is  used  by  James  (i.  n).  I  have  already  said  that 
the  address  of  Peter's  Epistle  seems  to  have  been  suggested 
by  that  of  James. 

It  has  been  asserted  that  Peter  also  made  use  of  the 
Epistle  to  the  Hebrews  ;  but  this  appears  to  me  more  than 
doubtful.  One  of  the  closest  of  the  coincidences,  viz.  the  use 
of  a7ra£  with  respect  to  the  offering  of  Christ  (Heb.  ix.  28, 
i  Pet.  iii.  18),  is  accounted  for  by  the  e<£a7ra£  of  Rom.  vi.  10. 
I  have  already  (see  p.  347)  said  something  about  the  coinci 
dences  between  Peter's  Epistle  and  Peter's  speeches  recorded 
in  the  Acts.* 

However  much  Peter  may  have  availed  himself  of  the 
writings  of  other  members  of  the  Apostolic  company,  he  had 
so  incorporated  with  his  own  mind  whatever  he  had  imbibed 
from  them,  that  his  letter,  notwithstanding  its  borrowings, 
bears  a  distinct  stamp  of  originality  and  individuality.  We 
cannot  read  it  without  feeling  that  this  is  not  the  work  of  a 
literary  artist,  whose  only  aim  is  to  make  a  clever  imitation 
of  the  previously  known  Apostolic  Epistles  ;  but  that,  on 
the  contrary,  the  writer's  object  is  entirely  practical.  His 
mind  is  full  of  the  condition  of  disciples  who  had  already 
had  to  endure  much  suffering  on  behalf  of  their  faith,  and  on 
whom  he  sees  coming  a  still  more  fiery  trial  of  persecution. 
His  great  object  is  to  bring  before  their  minds  such  thoughts 
as  shall  keep  them  steadfast  under  temptation,  and  give  them 
patience  and  even  cheerfulness  amid  their  tribulations.  In 
particular,  he  dwells  on  the  thoughts  (i.  6)  that  their  trials 
are  only  '  if  need  be,'  and  only  '  for  a  season.'  In  other 
words,  he  tells  them  that  their  sufferings  will  be  found  to 
constitute  a  salutary  discipline,  out  of  which  their  faith  will 
come  purified  like  gold  from  the  furnace,  and  that  after  a 
while  their  brief  period  of  trial  will  be  succeeded  by  eternal 

*  In  addition  to  the  examples  given  (p.  347),  there  have  been  cited  the 
use  of  rb  £v\ov  for  the  cross  (i  Pet.  ii.  24,  Acts  v.  30,  x.  39),  but  seeDeut. 
xxi.  23,  and  Gal.  iii.  13  ;  the  claim  to  be  a  '  witness'  to  Christ  (Acts  ii.  32, 
iii.  15,  I  Pet.  v.  i);  the  appeal  to  the  O.  T.  prophets  (Acts  iii.  18,  x.  43, 
i  Pet.  i.  10 ;  and  the  phrase  '  to  judge  the  quick  and  the  dead '  (Acts  x. 
42,  i  Pet.  iv.  5,  elsewhere  only  2  Tim.  iv.  I). 


XXII.]  ITS   ORIGINALITY   AND    INDIVIDUALITY.  49! 

glory.  He  dwells  so  much  on  this  promise  of  future  glory, 
that  he  has  been  called  by  some  critics  the  Apostle  of 
Hope. 

I  have  already  remarked  that,  if  we  compare  passages  in 
this  Epistle  with  passages  in  former  Epistles  which  may  seem 
to  have  suggested  them — for  example,  the  exhortation  to 
wives  in  this  Epistle  with  St.  Paul's  instructions  to  wives  in 
the  Epistle  to  the  Ephesians — we  find  here  so  completely 
new  a  choice  of  topics  as  fully  to  justify  our  assertion  of  the 
writer's  originality.  Other  points  peculiar  to  this  Epistle  are 
the  prominence  given  to  baptism  (iii.  21)  and  the  new  birth 
(i.  3,  23) ;  the  doctrine  of  Christ's  preaching  to  the  spirits  in 
prison  (iii.  19)  ;  the  interest  taken  by  the  angelic  host  in  the 
Christian  scheme  (i.  12);  the  designation  of  Christ  as  the 
Chief  Shepherd  ;  and  a  whole  series  of  topics  calculated  to 
raise  the  courage  of  sufferers  for  the  faith  (ii.  20,  &c.,  iv.  12, 
v.  9).  It  may  be  added  that  a  forger  would  have  been  likely 
to  give  to  Peter  some  less  modest  title  than  o-u^7rpeo-/?urepos, 
and  that  we  have  an  indication  of  early  date,  if  not  in  the  use 
of  the  word  eTrio-KOTrowres  (v.  2)  to  describe  the  work  of  the 
presbyters  (the  reading  here  being  doubtful,  and  the  argument 
in  any  case  not  cogent),  at  least  in  the  use  (v.  2)  with  respect 
to  their  flocks  of  the  phrase  TWV  K\rjp<av,  a  term  which  came 
in  very  early  times  to  be  appropriated  to  the  clergy. 


(     492     ) 


XXIII. 


THE  EPISTLE  OF   ST.  JAMES. 


I  HAVE  already  stated  (p.  475)  that  Eusebius  in  his  list  of 
Canonical  books  (iii.  25)  places  the  Epistle  of  James  in 
his  second  class,-  viz.  books  controverted,  but  recognized  by 
most.  Elsewhere  (ii.  23)  having  told  the  story  of  the  martyr 
dom  of  James  the  Just,  he  adds  :  'This  is  the  account  given 
of  James,  who  is  said  to  have  been  the  author  of  the  first  of 
what  are  called  the  Catholic  Epistles.  But  it  must  be  observed 
that  this  is  held  to  be  spurious  (voflev'ercu) :  at  least  not  many 
of  the  ancients  have  made  mention  of  it,  nor  yet  of  the  Epistle 
of  Jude,  which  is  likewise  one  of  the  seven  called  Catholic. 
Nevertheless,  we  know  that  these  have  been  publicly  used 
with  the  rest  in  most  Churches.'  The  suspicions  expressed 
by  Eusebius  are  more  strongly  stated  by  St.  Jerome  (De  Viris 
Illust.  3),  'James  wrote  only  one  Epistle,  which  is  one  of  the 
seven  Catholic.  It  is  asserted  that  this  was  published  by 
some  other  person  under  his  name,  though  as  time  went  on  it 
by  degrees  obtained  authority.'  We  learn  from  what  Eusebius 
says  that  there  was  current  in  his  time  a  collection  of  seven 
'  Catholic  Epistles/  which,  notwithstanding  the  doubts  of 
learned  men,  were  widely  acknowledged  as  authoritative. 
The  complete  subsidence  of  doubt  about  these  Epistles  in 
the  fifth  century  is  in  itself  evidence  that  they  must  have  been 
very  widely  received  in  the  fourth. 

Eusebius   himself,    in    his    Commentary   on   the    Psalms, 
quotes  the  Epistle  of  James  as  the  work  of  a  holy  Apostle.* 

*  A^yei  yovv  6  iepbs  av6ffro\os'  Ka.Koira.Qii  ns  K.T.\.  (James  v.  13) ;  in  Ps^ 

56,  p.  504,  Migne. 


XXIII.]   WHETHER  KNOWN  TO  CLEMENT  OF  ALEXANDRIA?    493 

and  as  Scripture  ;*  and  in  the  passages  cited  above  he  clearly 
gives  us  to  understand  that  the  cause  of  his  hesitation  about 
recognizing  the  Epistle  was  not  any  deficiency  of  acceptance 
in  the  Church  of  his  own  time,  but  infrequency  of  quotation 
by  earlier  Ecclesiastical  writers.  And  it  is  true  that  Origen 
is  the  earliest  writer  whom  we  can  produce  as  quoting  this 
Epistle  by  name.  He  uses,  too,  a  formula  of  citation,  '  the 
Epistle  current  as  that  of  James '  (lv  rfj  <^epo/xeV^  'I<XKW/?OU 
cTTioToAT/,  In  Joann.  xix.  6),  which  suggests  that  he  entertained 
doubts  as  to  the  authorship.  Elsewhere,  however,  he  calls 
the  writer  James,  without  expression  of  doubt  (in  Ps.  30). 
There  are  several  quotations  in  the  writings  of  Origen  which 
have  been  preserved  in  the  Latin  translation  -of  Rufinus, 
whose  faithfulness  as  a  translator,  however,  was  not  such  as 
to  enable  us  to  use  his  authority  with  perfect  confidence.  We 
seem  to  have  an  earlier  authority  in  Clement  of  Alexandria. 
Eusebius  (vi.  14)  says  that,  '  to  state  the  matter  shortly,  Cle 
ment  in  his  Hypotyposeis  gave  concise  expositions  of  all  the 
Canonical  Scriptures,  not  omitting  the  controverted  books — 
I  mean  the  Epistle  of  Jude  and  the  other  Catholic  Epistles, 
the  Epistle  of  Barnabas,  and  what  is  called  the  Revelation  of 
Peter.'  Photius  also  (Cod.  109)  adds  his  testimony  that  the 
Hypotyposeis  included  comments  on  the  Catholic  Epistles.  On 
this  evidence  several  have  thought  themselves  warranted  in 
asserting  that  Clement  commented  on  all  seven  Catholic 
Epistles.  But  we  are  led  to  doubt  this  by  the  testimony  of 
Cassiodorus  (De  Instit.  Div.  Litt.  c.  viii.).f  He  says  that 
Clement  made  comments  on  the  Canonical  Epistles,  that  is 
to  say,  on  the  First  Epistle  of  St.  Peter,  the  First  and  Second  of 
St.  John,  and  the  Epistle  of  James  ;  and  that  he  himself  had 
had  these  comments  translated  into  Latin,  omitting  a  few 
things  incautiously  said,  which  might  give  offence.  Now,  we 
have  every  reason  to  believe  that  the  Latin  fragments  of  the 
Hypotyposeis  printed  in  the  editions  of  Clement  are  these  very 


*  In  Ps.  100,  p.  1244. 

t  Cassiodorus,  who  had  been  minister  to  King  Theodoric,  in  his  old  age 
(about  A.D.  540)  retired  into  a  monastery,  where  he  gave  a  great  impulse 
to  literary  pursuits  among  monks,  and  himself  became  the  author  of  several 
treatises. 


494  THE    EPISTLE    OF   ST.    JAMES.  [XXIIK 

translations  of  which  Cassiodorus  speaks.  But  the  comments 
are  on  i  Pet.,  i  and  2  John,  and  Jude  ;  not  James.  And  since 
Eusebius  has  made  express  mention  of  Jude,  we  are  led  to 
correct  James  into  Jude  in  the  passage  of  Cassiodorus  just 
referred  to  ;  and  can  feel  no  confidence  in  saying  that  the 
Hypotyposeis  contained  comments  either  on  James  or  on  2 
Peter.  There  are  in  other  works  of  Clement  coincidences 
with  the  Epistle  of  James,  but  all  can  be  accounted  for  with- 
out  assuming  that  he  knew  the  Epistle.  What  seems  most 
like  a  real  quotation  is,  that  in  Strom,  vi.  18,  commenting  on 
Matt.  v.  20,  he  teaches  that  it  is  not  enough  for  us  to  abstain 
from  evil,  as  did  the  Scribes  and  Pharisees,  but  that  unless 
we  love  our  neighbour  and  do  him  good  we  shall  not  be 
'royal'  (fiacnXiKot).  There  might  seem  to  be  a  plain  reference 
here  to  the  '  royal'  law  of  James  iii.  8 ;  but  on  turning  back  to 
Strom,  ii.  4,  p.  438,  we  find  Clement  insisting  on  the  claim  of 
Christians  to  the  title  /fao-iAucot,  having  in  view  chiefly  the 
Stoic  ascription  of  kingly  dignity  to  the  wise  man  ;  and  we 
therefore  can  build  nothing  on  his  later  use  of  the  same 
title. 

Eusebius  was  not  likely  to  overlook  any  express  quotation 
of  disputed  books  by  early  writers.  But  he  might  easily  fail 
to  pay  attention  to  less  direct  proofs  of  their  antiquity.  Now, 
in  the  case  of  the  Epistle  of  James,  such  evidence  is  forth 
coming.  I  refer,  in  particular,  to  the  Shepherd  of  Hermas. 
This  is  a  book  in  which  Scripture  quotations,  either  from  Old 
or  New  Testament,  are  scarce ;  but  we  are  perpetually  re 
minded  of  James's  Epistle,  the  great  number  of  the  coinci 
dences  serving  as  proof  that  they  are  not  accidental.  The 
topics  dwelt  on  by  James  are  those  to  which  Hermas  most 
frequently  recurs.  Thus  the  doctrine  of  the  opening  verses  of 
James  is  several  times  echoed  by  Hermas — that  we  must  ask 
God  for  wisdom  (Sim.  v.  4,  ix.  2),  ask  in  faith  without  doubt 
or  hesitation ;  for  he  who  doubts  must  not  expect  to  receive 
anything  (James  i.  7,  Mand.  ix.).  He  who  so  doubts  is  called  a 
double-minded  man  (James  i.  8),  and  the  phrase  Su/o^'a  in  this 
sense  is  of  constant  occurrence  is  Hermas.  Again,  there  are 
exhortations  to  the  rich,  warning  them  that  the  groanings  of 
the  neglected  poor  will  go  up  before  the  Lord  (compare  James 


XXIII.]  KNOWN   TO    IREN^US.  495 

ii.  6,  v.  1-6,  Vis.  iii.  9)  All  through  Mand.  xi.  there  runs  a 
reference  to  the  contrast  which  St. James  draws  (iii.  15,  17) 
between  the  wisdom  which  cometh  from  above  (avwflev),  and 
that  which  is  earthly,  eTrt'yetos.  As  examples  of  how  the 
vocabulary  of  James  is  reproduced  in  Hennas,  I  mention 
d/caTacrrao-ia,  d/caTaorraTos  (James  iii.  1 6,  i.  8,  Sim.  vi.  3,  Mand. 
ii.  3);  Ka.6a.pa.  /cat  d/xiavT09  (James  i.  27,  Mand.  ii.  7);  /capTros 
St/catoo-wrjs  (James  iii.  18,  Stm.ix.  19) ;  o-waywy>j  for  the  place 
of  Christian  worship  (James  ii.  2,  Mand.  xi.  9) ;  erpv^yjo-aTc  /cat 
eo-TraTaXrjo-aTC  (James  V.  5,  Sim.  vi.  i)  ;  xaXtvaycoye'co  (James  i.  26, 
iii.  2,  Mand.  xii.  i);  TroXv'o-TrXayxi'os  (James  v.  ii,  Sim.  v.  4)  ; 
6  Swajuevos  o-wcrai  /cat  aTroXeVat  (James  iv.  12,  Mand.  xii.  6); 
/caraXaXeo)  (James  iv.  ii,  Mand.  ii.  2,  *SV;ra.  ix.  23).  In  con 
clusion,  I  mention  two  striking  parallels:  'the  worthy  name 
by  which  ye  are  called,'  James  ii.  7  (TO  /caXoi/  ovo/xa  TO  e?rt- 
K\Y}6lv  ec/>'  vyaas),  TO  oVo/xa  Kvpiov  TO  eTTt/cX^^ev  CTT'  auTOvs  (Sim. 
viii.  6) ;  and  the  exhortation  (Mand.  xii.  5),  'The  devil  may 
wrestle  against  you,  but  cannot  overthrow  you ;  for  if  ye 
resist  him  he  will  flee  from  you  in  confusion*  (compare  James 
iv.  7). 

In  the  Epistle  of  the  Roman  Clement  there  are  several 
coincidences  which,  in  my  opinion,  are  best  explained  as 
indicating  that  he  used  the  Epistle  of  James,  though  I  do  not 
venture  to  say  that  any  of  them  quite  amounts  to  a  positive 
proof.  Thus,  the  quotation  (c.  30)  '  GWresisteth  the  proud/ 
&c.,  may  have  been  suggested  not  by  James  but  by  i  Peter ; 
and  Clement's  independent  study  of  the  Old  Testament  may 
have  led  him  (c.  10),  to  call  Abraham  the  '  friend  of  God.' 
But  though  this  title  is  twice  found  in  our  English  version 
(2  Chron.  xx.  7,  Isai.  xii.  8),  the  corresponding  Hebrew  word 
is  not  literally  translated  by  '  friend  ;'  and  the  LXX.  render  it 
not  by  c/>t'Xos,  but  in  the  first  place  TO?  ^yaTny/xeVw  o-ov,  in  the 
second  ov^yaTn/cra.  It  appears,  however,  from  Field's  Hexapla, 
that  some  copies  of  the  LXX.  have  the  rendering  'friend'  in 
the  first  passage,  and  that  Symmachus  had  it  in  the  second. 
There  seems  also  to  have  been  a  various  reading  c/>tXov  for 
TratSos  in  Gen.  xvii.  17,  and  Philo  so  cites  the  verse  (De  resipis. 
Noe,  p.  401,  Mangey) ;  there  is  also  an  apparent  allusion  to  it 
in  Wisdom  vii.  27.  We  therefore  cannot  argue  as  if  it  were 


496  THE    EPISTLE    OF   ST.    JAMES.  [XXIII. 

only  from  James  that  Clement  could  have  learned  to  use  the 
term.  Still  Clement's  acquaintance  with  our  Epistle  must  be 
pronounced  highly  probable,  when  we  note  how  he  dwells  on 
the  obedience  as  well  as  the  faith  of  Abraham ;  when  we  ob 
serve  other  coincidences,  as,  for  example,  between 
lv  dAa£ovei'a  (Clem.  21)  and  Kav^aa-Oe  ev  rats 
(James  iv.  16)  :  and  when  we  bear  in  mind  that  James 
was  certainly  used  by  Clement's  contemporary,  Hermas. 

In  any  case  we  are  forced  to  ascribe  to  the  influence  of 
James  ii.  23  the  manner  in  which  two  Old  Testament  passages 
are  combined  by  Irenaeus  (iv.  xvi.),  'Abraham  believed  God, 
and  it  was  imputed  unto  him  for  righteousness,  and  he  was 
called  the  friend  of  God':  see  also  his  use  of  the  phrase  Maw 
of  liberty '  (iv.  xxxiv.  4),  a  phrase  which  seems  to  have  sug 
gested  some  of  the  preceding  arguments  in  the  same  book. 
Hippolytus  has  been  quoted  as  using  the  Epistle,  the  words 
(James  ii.  13)  'he  shall  have  judgment  without  mercy,  that 
showed  no  mercy,'  being  found  in  the  treatise  Concerning  the. 
End  of  the  World  (c.  47) ;  but  this  treatise  is  not  genuine. 
The  resemblances  that  have  been  pointed  out  in  the  writings 
of  Tertullian  appear  to  me  to  furnish  no  proof  that  he  knew 
St.  James's  Epistle ;  and  no  mention  of  it  is  found  in  the 
Muratorian  Fragment.  On  the  other  hand,  the  Epistle  was 
early  acknowledged  by  the  Syrian  Church,*  and  is  found  in 
the  Peshitto. 

It  is  curious  that,  as  far  as  I  am  aware,  no  clear  proof  of 
the  use  of  the  Epistle  is  found  in  the  pseudo-Clementines, 
although  in  the  sect  from  which  these  writings  emanated, 
James,  the  head  of  the  Church  at  Jerusalem,  was  accounted 
the  highest  personage  in  the  Church. 

From  this  review  of  the  external  evidence  it  appears  that, 
although  the  antiquity  of  the  Epistle  is  sufficiently  established 
by  the  use  made  of  it  by  Hermas,  it  must  in  early  times  have 
had  a  very  limited  circulation,  and  been  little  known  either 
in  Alexandria  or  in  the  West.  But,  on  the  other  hand,  in 
ternal  evidence  is  altogether  favourable  to  the  claims  of  the 
Epistle. 

*  See  Ephraem  Syr.  Opp.  Grace,  iii.  51. 


XXIII.]  WRITTEN    BY  A  JEW   TO   JEWS.  497 

Very  early  tradition  asserted  that  the  Church  of  Jerusalem 
was  first  presided  over  by  James,  '  the  Lord's  brother.'  The 
pseudo-Clementine  writings  so  far  magnify  the  office  of  this 
James  as  to  make  him  not  only  head  of  the  local  Church,  but 
supreme  ruler  of  the  Christian  society.  We  find  no  warrant 
elsewhere  for  this  extension  of  the  claims  of  James  ;  but  with 
regard  to  the  Jerusalem  Episcopate,  early  authorities  are 
unanimous.  Hegesippus  (Euseb.  ii.  23,  iii.  32,  iv.  22)  not 
only  relates  that  James  was  the  first  Bishop  of  Jerusalem,  but 
also  states  that  on  his  death  Symeon,  another  relative  of  our 
Lord  after  the  flesh,  was  made  the  second  Bishop ;  and  it 
was  probably  from  Hegesippus  that  Eusebius  derived  the  list 
which  he  gives  of  successors  to  Symeon.  Clement  of  Alex 
andria  also,  in  his  Hypotyposeis  cited  by  Eusebius  (ii.  i),  says 
that  Peter,  James,  and  John,  after  our  Lord's  ascension,  were 
not  ambitious  of  dignity,  honoured  though  they  had  been  by 
the  preference  of  their  master,  but  chose  James  the  Just  as 
Bishop  of  Jerusalem.  With  this  early  tradition  the  Scripture 
notices  completely  agree.  It  is  James  to  whom  Peter  sends 
the  news  of  his  release  from  prison  (Acts  xii.  17)  ;  James  who 
presides  over  the  meeting  at  Jerusalem  (Acts  xv.),  and  whose 
decision  is  adopted  ;  James  whom  Paul  visits,  and  whose 
counsel  he  follows  on  a  later  visit  to  Jerusalem  (Actsxxi.  18). 
The  inferences  drawn  from  these  passages  in  the  Acts  are 
confirmed  by  the  Epistle  to  the  Galatians  (i.  19,  ii.  9,  12).  I 
count  it  the  more  probable  opinion  that  this  James  was  not 
one  of  the  Twelve.  Possibly  he  had  not  been  a  believer  in 
our  Lord  at  the  time  the  Twelve  were  chosen. 

Critics  are  so  generally  agreed  that  our  Epistle  purports 
to  have  been  written  by  this  James  who  presided  over  the 
Church  of  Jerusalem,  that  I  do  not  think  it  worth  while  to 
discuss  the  claims  of  any  other  James.  Now  the  letter  itself 
completely  harmonizes  with  this  traditional  account  of  its 
authorship,  for  it  appears  plainly  to  have  been  written  by  a 
Jew  for  Jewish  readers,  and  in  the  very  earliest  age  of  the 
Church.  Hug  (Introduction,  vol.  ii.,  sec.  148)  has  carefully 
noted  several  indications  which,  though  they  do  not  amount 
to  a  proof,  at  least  point  to  Palestine  as  the  place  of  composi 
tion.  The  writer  appears  to  have  lived  not  far  from  the  sea. 

2  K 


498  THE   EPISTLE    OF   ST.    JAMES.  [XXIII. 

He  takes  his  illustrations  from  the  wave  of  the  sea  driven  by 
the  wind  and  tossed  ;  from  the  ships  which,  though  they  be 
so  great  and  are  driven  by  fierce  winds,  are  turned  about  with 
a  very  small  helm  whithersoever  the  steersman  desireth  (i.  6, 
iii.  4).  His  land  is  the  same  as  that  of  which  it  is  written  in 
Deut.  xi.  14:  '  I  will  give  you  the  rain  of  your  land  in  his  due 
season,  the  first  rain  and  the  latter  rain,  that  thou  mayest 
gather  in  thy  corn,  and  thy  wine,  and  thine  oil :'  for  he  illus 
trates  patience  by  the  example  of  the  husbandman  waiting 
for  the  precious  fruit  of  the  earth,  and  having  long  patience 
until  he  receive  the  early  and  the  latter  rain  (v.  7).  And  that 
wine  and  oil,  as  well  as  corn,  were  among  the  natural  produce 
of  his  land  is  shown  by  his  question,  'Can  the  fig-tree  bear 
olive-berries,  or  a  vine  figs  ?'  (iii.  12).  The  hot  burning  wind 
(/cavo-on/)  which,  when  it  swept  the  land,  withered  up  the  grass 
(i.  1 1),  is  the  same  as  that  of  which,  according  to  the  Septua- 
gint  translation,  Ezekiel  speaks,  when  he  asks,  '  Shall  not  the 
plant  utterly  wither  when  the  east  wind  toucheth  it  ?  it  shall 
wither  in  the  furrows  where  it  grew'  (xvii.  10).  It  is  the 
same  wind  which  burned  up  the  gourd  of  Jonah  ;  the  same 
probably  whose  approach  our  Lord  (St.  Luke  xii.  54-57) 
represents  His  countrymen  as  exerting  their  weather-wisdom 
to  forecast ;  the  same  which  caused  the  burden  and  heat  of 
the  day  spoken  of  in  the  parable  of  the  labourers  of  the  vine 
yard.  Salt  and  bitter  springs  are  known  to  the  writer  (iii.  1 1), 
and  his  country  was  exposed  to  suffer  from  droughts  (v.  17). 

The  writer  was  not  only  a  Jew,  but  he  wrote  for  Jews.  The 
address  explicitly  declares  for  whom  it  was  intended — the 
Jews  of  the  Dispersion,*  the  twelve  tribes  that  were  scattered 
abroad  :  that  is  to  say,  the  letter  was  written  by  a  Jew 
residing  in  his  own  land  to  his  countrymen  whom  commercial 
enterprise  had  scattered  over  the  empire ;  with  whom  migra 
tion  from  one  city  to  another  was  an  ordinary  occurrence,  as 

*  The  term  seems  to  have  its  original  in  Deut.  xxviii.  25,  e<r??  Smo-Tropo  eV 
•jrdaais  fiacriXeiais  TTJS  77)5.  It  occurs  often  in  the  O.  T.,  e.g.  Deut.  xxx.  4, 
quoted  Neh.  i.  9  ;  Ps.  cxlvi.  2  ;  2  Mace.  i.  27  ;  Judith  v.  19;  but  not  in  the 
technical  sense  in  which  it  is  here  employed.  And  though  Josephus  (Bell. 
Jud.  vii.  35),  and  Philo  (Legat.  ad  Caium,  1023)  speak  of  the  dispersion 
of  the  Jewish  nation,  they  do  not  use  this  word.  We  have  real  parallels 
in  John  vii.  35,  and  Justin  Martyr  (Trypho,  ii.  7). 


XXIII.]  THE   WRITER   HAD   HEARD    OUR    LORD.  499 

they  said,  '  To-day  or  to-morrow  we  will  go  into  such  a  city, 
and  continue  there  a  year,  and  buy  and  sell,  and  get  gain ' 
(iv.  13) :  a  migration  which  may  be  illustrated  from  the  New 
Testament  references  to  Aquila  and  Priscilla,  whom,  though 
originally  from  Pontus,  we  find  successively  at  Rome,  at 
Corinth,  and  Ephesus,  at  Rome  again,  and  at  Ephesus  again 
(Acts  xviii.  1,19;  Rom.  xvi.  3  ;  2  Tim.  iv.  19).  But  to  return 
to  the  proofs  that  the  letter  is  from  a  Jew  to  Jews,  the  writer 
speaks  of  Abraham  as  'our  father'  (ii.  21);  he  gives  their 
place  of  meeting  the  Jewish  name  of  synagogue  (ii.  2) ;  he 
assumes  the  Old  Testament  to  be  familiarly  known  by  his 
readers,  referring  to  Rahab,  Job,  Elias,  and  the  prophets  (ii. 
25,  v.  10,  v.  17):  God  is  designated  by  the  Old  Testament 
name  the  Lord  of  Sabaoth  (v.  4) ;  and  the  Mosaic  law  is 
assumed  to  be  an  authority  from  which  there  is  no  appeal. 

The  Jews,  however,  who  are  addressed  are  all  Christian 
Jews.  The  writer  describes  himself  as  the  servant  of  our 
Lord  Jesus  Christ,  and  addresses  his  readers  as  his  brethren. 
He  speakes  of  the  worthy  name  by  which  they  are  called  (ii. 
7) ;  and,  in  short,  the  whole  letter  assumes  a  community  of 
faith  between  the  writer  and  his  readers.  The  history  of  the 
Acts  relates  a  dispersion  of  Christian  Jews  resulting  from  the 
persecution  that  followed  the  death  of  Stephen  ;  so  that  we 
are  at  no  loss  to  seek  for  Christian  Jews  of  the  Dispersion  to 
whom,  at  an  early  date,  the  letter  might  have  been  addressed. 
Syria,  in  particular,  was  full  of  them,  and  it  is  not  improbable 
that  this  was  the  country  to  which  the  letter  was  in  the  first 
instance  sent.  I  have  already  said  the  Epistle  is  found  in  the 
ancient  Syriac  Peshitto  translation. 

Further,  there  is  every  appearance  that  the  writer  of  this 
Epistle  had  been  a  personal  follower  of  our  Lord.  We  infer 
this  from  the  number  of  passages  where  we  have  an  echo  of 
our  Lord's  discourses.  In  the  Epistles  of  Paul,  who  was  not 
a  hearer  of  our  Lord  during  His  earthly  ministry,  though 
references  to  the  person  and  to  the  work  of  Christ  are  of 
constant  occurrence,  there  is  but  little  trace  of  the  influence 
of  our  Lord's  discourses.*  It  is  otherwise  here.  There  is 

*  One  of  the  few  examples  of  such  influence  is  the  saying  (r  Thess.  v.  2), 
2  K  2 


500  THE    EPISTLE    OF   ST.   JAMES.  [XXIII. 

nothing  indeed  that  we  are  entitled  to  say  is  directly  copied 
from  the  Synoptic  Gospels  ;  but  there  are  very  many  resem 
blances  to  the  discourses  of  our  Lord  which  those  Gospels 
record,  such  as  find  their  most  natural   explanation  in  the 
supposition  that  a  hearer  of  those  discourses,  on  whom  they 
had  made  a  deep  impression,  is  perhaps  unconsciously  repro 
ducing  the  lessons  he  had  learned  from  them.     The  most 
striking  example  will  probably  have  occurred  to  you  :  '  My 
brethren,  swear  not,  neither  by  heaven,  neither  by  the  earth, 
neither  by  any  other  oath  ;  but  let  your  yea  be  yea,  and  your 
nay  nay,  lest  ye  fall  into  condemnation  '  (James  v.  12,  Matt, 
v.  37).     But  there  is  a  number  of  cases  where,  though  the 
resemblance  is  not  so  complete,  it  is  sufficient  to  leave  little 
doubt  that  it  is  more  than  accidental.     St.  James  says,  'Be 
ye  doers  of  the  word,  and  not  hearers  only'  (i.  22) :  our  Lord 
had  said,  '  Everyone  that  heareth  these  sayings  of  mine,  and 
doeth  them  not,  shall  be  likened  unto  a  foolish  man  which 
built  his  house  upon  the  sand'  (Matt.  vii.  26).     St.  James, 
'the  doer  of  the  work  shall  be  blessed  in  his  doing'  (i.  25)  : 
our  Lord,  '  If  ye  know  these  things,  happy  are  ye  if  ye  do 
them'  (John  xiii.  17).     St.  James  speaks  of  the  poor  of  this 
world  as  heirs  of  the  kingdom  (ii.  5)  :  our  Lord  had  said, 
'  Blessed  are  ye  poor,  for  yours  is  the  kingdom  of  God '  (Luke 
vi.  20).     St.  James,  '  Humble  yourselves  in  the  sight  of  the 
Lord,  and  he  shall  exalt  you'   (iv.  10):  our  Lord  had  said, 
4  He  that  shall  humble  himself  shall  be  exalted'  (Matt,  xxiii. 
12).     'Who  art  thou  that  judgest  another?'  cries  St.  James 
(iv.  12) :  our  Lord  had  said, 'Judge  not,  that  ye  be  not  judged' 
(Matt.  vii.  i).     St.  James  says,  'If  any  of  you  lack  wisdom, 
let  him  ask  of  God,  and  it  shall  be  given  him'  (i.  5) ;  echoing 
our  Lord's  words,  'Ask,  and  it  shall  be  given  you'  (Matt, 
vii.  7).     St.  James  goes  on  to  say,  '  But  let  him  ask  in  faith, 
nothing  wavering*  (foySev  Sia/cpivo/tevos) :  our  Lord's  promise 
(Mark  xi.  23)  had  been,  'Whosoever  shall  not  doubt  in  his 
heart  (/AT)  Sta/cpt&J),  but  shall  believe,  shall  have  whatsoever  he 
saith.'     Again,  our  Lord's   words,   *  Be  ye  perfect,  as   your 

that  the  day  of  the  Lord  cometh  'as  a  thief  in  the  night.'  Our  Lord's 
discourse  here  referred  to  seems  to  have  deeply  impressed  His  hearers  (see 
2  Pet.  iii.  10.  Rev.  iii.  3,  and  xvi.  15). 


XXIII.]   WRITTEN  BEFORE  DESTRUCTION  OF  JERUSALEM.       501 

Father  in  heaven  is  perfect'  (Matt.  v.  48),  appear  in  James  in 
the  form,  '  Let  patience  have  her  perfect  work,  that  ye  may  be 
perfect'  (i.  4).  St.  James's  denunciations  of  the  rich  (c.  v.) 
reproduce  our  Lord's,  '  Woe  unto  you  rich,  for  ye  have  re 
ceived  your  consolation*  (Luke  vi.  24).  St.  James's  'Let 
your  laughter  be  turned  to  mourning,  and  your  joy  to  heavi 
ness'  (iv.  9),  answers  to  our  Lord's  '  Woe  unto  you  that  laugh 
now,  for  ye  shall  mourn  and  weep*  (Luke  vi.  25).  Other 
instances  might  be  added,  and  in  some  of  them,  no  doubt, 
the  likeness  may  be  only  accidental ;  but  the  cases  are  too 
numerous  to  allow  us  to  think  that  they  are  all  chance  resem 
blances.  They  are,  as  I  say,  not  cases  of  quotation  from  the 
Synoptic  Gospels,  but  have  all  the  air  of  being  independent 
testimony  to  our  Lord's  teaching  given  by  one  who  draws 
his  lessons  from  his  own  memory  of  what  he  had  learned 
from  his  Master.  I  have  already  (p.  221)  thrown  out  the  con 
jecture  that  a  great  deal  more  of  James's  Epistle  may  be 
founded  on  sayings  of  our  Lord  than  we  have  now  the  means 
of  identifying ;  and,  in  particular,  that  what  is  said  (i.  12)  of 
our  Lord's  promise  of  '  a  crown  of  life '  may  refer  to  an  unre 
corded  saying  of  the  Saviour. 

Turning  now  to  examine  the  date  of  the  composition,  we 
can  infer  that  it  was  written  before  the  destruction  of  Jerusa 
lem,  from  the  entire  aspect  which  it  presents  of  the  relations 
between  the  Christian  Jews  and  their  unconverted  brethren. 
The  Apostle  represents  the  religious  diiference  as  in  a  great 
degree  coincident  with  a  difference  in  social  condition.  It  is 
the  poor  of  this  world  who  have  been  chosen,  rich  in  faith, 
and  heirs  of  the  kingdom  which  God  has  promised  to  them 
that  love  Him.  The  rich,  on  the  other  hand,  oppress  the  dis 
ciples,  draw  them  before  the  tribunals,  and  blaspheme  the 
worthy  Name  by  which  they  are  called.  And  again,  towards 
the  end  of  the  letter,  the  Apostle,  in  tones  of  one  of  the  old 
prophets,  denounces  the  luxury  and  wantonness,  the  grasping 
oppression  and  tyranny,  of  the  rich,  and  lifts  up  his  voice  in 
warning  of  the  misery  that  was  to  come  on  them. 

Now  the  picture  here  exhibited  well  corresponds  with  that 
which  is  presented  by  Josephus  and  other  Jewish  authorities, 
of  the  condition  of  Palestine  in  the  time  following  the  death 


502  THE   EPISTLE   OF    ST.    JAMES.  [_XXI11- 

of  our  Lord.  The  pride  and  luxury  of  the  rich  Sadducean 
party  were  at  their  height.  They  filled  the  high  offices  of  the 
priesthood,  which  they  had  simoniacally  purchased  with 
money.  They  tyrannized  over  the  poor.  Josephus  tells  how 
the  high  priests  sent  their  servants  to  the  threshing-floors  to 
take  away  the  tithes  that  by  right  belonged  to  the  poorer 
priests,  beating  those  who  refused  to  give  them;  and  that 
some  of  the  poorer  priests,  thus  defrauded  of  their  main 
tenance,  actually  died  of  want  (Antt.  xx.  viii.  8,  ix.  2).*  It 
can  easily  be  imagined  that  the  religiously-minded  of  the 
Jews  revolted  against  such  practices,  and  that  poverty  and 
piety  came  to  be  naturally  associated.  It  was  most  natural, 
too,  that  it  should  be  among  those  who  revolted  against  the 
worldliness  and  ungodliness  of  the  men  of  high  condition, 
that  minds  should  be  found  best  prepared  for  the  reception 
of  the  Gospel.  In  fact,  the  poverty  of  the  Jewish  Church  is 
proved  by  many  indications.  The  Gentile  Churches  were,  as  a 
whole,  not  very  rich.  St.  Paul  says  that  not  many  mighty,  not 
many  noble,  had  been  called ;  but  yet  the  Gentile  Churches 
were  rich  in  comparison  with  the  native  Jewish  Church  ;  and 
in  the  Acts  and  in  Paul's  Epistles  we  read  more  than  once  of 
the  contributions  which  the  Apostle  of  the  Gentiles  collected 
among  his  converts,  that  he  might  bring  them  as  alms  to  his 
nation  and  offerings.  In  somewhat  later  times  Ebionite,  a 
name  derived  from  poverty,  was  that  by  which  the  Jewish 
Christians  were  known.  We  see,  then,  how  completely 
historical  is  the  picture  which  St.  James's  Epistle  presents  of 
the  social  line  of  separation  which,  as  a  general  rule,  divided 
the  Christians  from  their  unconverted  brethren.  But  this 
picture  belongs  to  a  time  before  the  destruction  of  Jerusalem. 
The  rich  classes  courted  the  favour  of  the  Romans,  and  by 
purchasing  their  support  were  able  to  maintain  the  tyranny 
which  they  exercised  over  their  poorer  brethren.  Thus  they 
arrayed  against  themselves  not  only  the  religious  but  the 
patriotic  feelings  of  the  nation.  At  length  this  patriotism 
burst  forth  in  wild  fury,  which  drew  down  destruction  on  the 
city.  And  then  the  Sadducean  power  came  to  an  end  ;  so 

*  See  Derenbourg's  Palestine,  c.  15. 


XXIII.]  INTENDED   FOR  JEWISH   READERS.  503 

that  it  would  be  a  complete  anachronism  to  put  any  later  that 
representation  of  the  heartless,  God-forgetting  prosperity  of 
the  upper  classes  which  we  find  in  St.  James's  Epistle.  The 
argument  which  I  have  here  used  convinces  Renan,  who 
accepts  this  Epistle  as  written  before  the  destruction  of 
Jerusalem.* 

We  find  other  evidence  of  early  date  in  the  indistinctness 
of  the  line  of  separation  between  the  converted  and  the  un 
converted  Jew.  The  Christian  Jew,  as  we  know  from  the 
Acts,  frequented  the  Temple  worship,  and  observed  the 
national  rites.  James  himself  bore  among  his  countrymen 
a  reputation  for  the  greatest  sanctity.f  But  the  Christians 
had  besides  of  necessity  synagogues  of  their  own,  private 
conventicles  for  their  own  worship.  These  were  open  to  any 
unconverted  brethren  whom  curiosity  might  lead  to  visit 
them.  In  the  very  natural  picture  drawn  (ch.  ii.)  of  the  well- 
dressed  stranger  coming  into  the  synagogue,  received  with 
high  respect,  and  shown  into  the  best  seat,  the  poor  visitor 
allowed  to  stand  or  pushed  into  the  least-honoured  place,  it 
is  plain  that  the  visitors  are  men  who  have  no  recognized 
right  to  a  place  of  their  own  ;  that  is  to  say,  that  they  are 
strangers  to  the  community.  Further  evidence  may  be  drawn 
from  the  statement  that  the  rich  oppressors  harassed  the 
Christians  by  bringing  them  before  the  tribunals.  This  can 
not  refer  to  Gentile  tribunals.  Down  to  a  date  later  than 
any  suggested  for  this  letter,  a  charge  brought  against  Chris 
tians  solely  on  the  ground  of  their  religion  would  be  received 
by  a  heathen  magistrate  as  Gallic  received  the  accusation 
brought  against  St.  Paul.  But  the  Roman  policy  allowed  to 
the  Jewish  authorities  considerable  power  over  their  own 
countrymen ;  and  that  not  only  in  the  Holy  Land  itself,  but 
in  the  countries  to  which  the  Jews  were  dispersed.  With 
respect  to  Syria,  in  particular,  we  have  evidence  in  the  mission 
of  Saul  to  Damascus,  where  the  power  and  authority  given 

*  Des  tableaux  evidemment  relatifs  aux  luttes  interieures  des  classes 
diverses  de  la  societe  hierosolymitaine,  comme  celui  que  nous  presente 
1'epitre  de  Jacques  (v.  I  et  suiv.)  ne  se  coi^oivent  pas  apres  la  revoke  de 
1'an  66  qui  mit  fin  au  regne  des  Sadduceens  (UAntechrist,  p.  xii.). 

t  See  the  account  of  James  given  by  Hegesippus  (Euseb.  ii.  23). 


504  THE    EPISTLE   OF   ST.   JAMES.  [XXIII. 

him  by  the  chief  priests  at  Jerusalem  would  have  sufficed 
him  for  the  imprisonment  and  further  punishment  of  those 
who  called  on  the  name  of  Jesus.  It  is  plain,  then,  that  when 
the  Epistle  was  written  the  Christians  were  in  the  eyes  of 
their  Roman  masters  but  a  sect  of  Jews,  and  were  as  such 
subject  to  their  national  tribunals. 

But  we  may  go  still  further  back,  and  argue  from  the  total 
absence  of  all  reference  in  the  Epistle  to  the  non-Jewish 
world.  There  is  not  a  word  of  allusion  to  the  existence  in  the 
Church  of  men  of  Gentile  birth;  not  the  slightest  notice  of 
the  controversies  to  which  their  admission  led  as  to  the  obliga 
tion  of  such  persons  to  observe  the  Mosiac  law.  It  is  often 
one  of  the  surest  criteria  of  the  date  of  a  document  to  notice 
what  were  the  controversial  interests  of  the  writer.  In  the 
present  instance  there  is  no  notice  whatever  of  that  great 
dispute  on  which  the  assembly,  whose  proceedings  are  re 
corded  in  the  i5th  of  Acts,  was  called  on  to  pronounce,  and 
of  which  the  Epistles  to  the  Galatians,  Romans,  and  Corin 
thians  are  full,  namely,  the  terms  of  justification  of  the 
Gentile  believer,  and  the  extent  to  which  he  was  obliged  to 
observe  the  Mosaic  law.  In  this  Epistle  all  its  readers  are 
assumed  to  be  under  the  obligations  of  that  law. 

What  I  have  stated  would  not  be  correct  if  the  views  could 
be  maintained  of  those  who  look  upon  the  latter  half  of  the 
second  chapter  as  an  anti-Pauline  polemic ;  some  even  main 
taining  that  the  Apostle  Paul  is  the  '  vain  man,'  who  needed 
to  be  taught  that  faith  without  works  is  dead ;  though  such 
language  is  so  little  fitted  to  the  character  of  the  historical 
James,  that  the  theory  that  this  chapter  is  anti-Pauline  com 
monly  leads  to  the  theory  that  the  Epistle  is  not  genuine, 
but  is  the  late  work  of  some  Jewish  Christian  opponent  of 
Paulinism,  who  dignified  his  performance  with  the  name  of 
the  'pillar  Apostle'  James.  In  fact,  to  a  disciple  of  Baur 
there  is  no  more  disappointing  document  than  this  Epistle  of 
James.  Here,  if  anywhere  in  the  New  Testament,  he  raight 
expect  to  find  some  evidence  of  anti-Pauline  rancour.  There 
is  what  looks  like  flat  contradiction  between  this  Epistle  and 
the  teaching  of  St.  Paul.  St.  Paul  says  (Rom.  iii.  28),  'There 
fore  we  conclude  that  a  man  is  justified  by  faith  without  the 


XXIII.]       SILENT   AS   TO    DISPUTES    OF    PAUL'S   TIME.  505 

deeds  of  the  law.'  St.  James  says  (ii.  24),  '  Ye  see  then  how 
that  by  works  a  man  is  justified,  and  not  by  faith  only.'  Our 
first  impression  certainly  is  that  not  only  is  the  teaching  of 
the  two  Apostles  different,  but  that  the  one  wrote  with  the 
express  purpose  of  controverting  what  the  other  had  said. 
But  that  opposition  to  Paul  which,  on  a  superficial  glance,  we 
are  disposed  to  ascribe  to  the  Epistle  of  James,  disappears  on 
a  closer  examination. 

I  postpone  for  the  moment  the  question  whether  we  can 
suppose  that  James  intended  to  contradict  Paul ;  but  whether 
he  intended  it  or  not,  he  has  not  really  done  so  ;  he  has  denied 
nothing  that  Paul  has  asserted,  and  asserted  nothing  that  a 
disciple  of  Paul  would  care  to  deny.  On  comparing  the  lan 
guage  of  James  with  that  of  Paul,  all  the  distinctive  expres 
sions  of  the  latter  are  found  to  be  absent  from  the  former. 
St.  Paul's  thesis  is  that  a  man  is  justified  not  by  the  works  of 
the  law,  but  by  the  faith  of  Jesus  Christ.  James  speaks  only 
of  works  without  any  mention  of  the  law,  and  of  faith  without 
any  mention  of  Jesus  Christ ;  the  example  of  faith  which  he 
considers  being  merely  the  belief  that  there  is  one  God.  In 
other  words,  James  is  writing  not  in  the  interests  of  Judaism, 
but  of  morality.  Paul  had  taught  that  faith  in  Jesus  Christ 
was  able  to  justify  a  man  uncircumcised,  and  unobservant  of 
the  Mosaic  ordinances.  He  taught,  and  St.  Peter  also  is  re 
presented  in  the  Acts  (xv.  n)  as  teaching,  that  it  was  only 
through  the  grace  of  the  Lord  Jesus  Christ  that  Jew  or  Gentile 
could  be  saved,  and  that  it  was  therefore  wrong  to  put  on  the 
necks  of  the  brethren  the  yoke  of  other  conditions  asserted  to 
be  necessary  to  salvation.  For  this  Pauline  teaching  James 
not  only  has  no  word  of  contradiction,  but  he  gives  no  sign  of 
ever  having  heard  of  the  controversy  which,  according  to 
Baur,  formed  the  most  striking  feature  in  the  early  history  of 
the  Church. 

On  the  other  hand,  no  disciple  of  Paul  would  wish  to  con 
tradict  what  James  does  say  as  to  the  worthlessness  of  specu 
lative  belief  that  bears  no  fruit  in  action.  Paul  himself  had 
said  the  same  things  in  other  words,  '  Thou  art  called  a  Jew, 
and  restest  in  the  law,  and  makest  thy  boast  of  God,  and 
knowest  his  will,  and  approvest  the  things  that  are  more 


506  THE   EPISTLE    OF   ST.   JAMES.  [XXIII. 

excellent,  being  instructed  out  of  the  law  ;  and  art  confident 
that  thou  thyself  art  a  guide  of  the  blind,  a  light  of  them 
which  are  in  darkness,  an  instructor  of  the  foolish,  a  teacher 
of  babes,  which  hast  the  form  of  knowledge,  and  of  the  truth 
in  the  law.  Thou,  therefore,  which  teachest  another,  teachest 
thou  not  thyself?  thou  that  preachest  a  man  should  not  steal, 
dost  thou  steal?  thou  that  sayest  a  man  should  not  commit 
adultery,  dost  thou  commit  adultery  ?  thou  that  abhorrest 
idols,  dost  thou  commit  sacrilege  ?  thou  that  makest  thy 
boast  of  the  law,  through  breaking  the  law  dishonorest  thou 
God?'  (Rom.  ii.  17-23). 

I  need  not  remind  you  what  controversies  there  have  been 
in  the  Christian  Church  on  the  subject  of  justification.  Luther, 
you  know,  at  one  time  regarded  the  difference  between  the 
two  Apostles  as  irreconcilable,  and  applied  a  disparaging 
epithet  to  the  Epistle  of  James.  But  whatever  embarrass 
ment  the  apparent  disagreement  between  the  Apostles  has 
caused  to  orthodox  theologians  is  as  nothing  in  comparison 
with  the  embarrassment  caused  to  a  disciple  of  Baur  by  their 
fundamental  agreement.  For  the  disputes  on  the  subject  of 
justification  all  lie  in  the  region  of  speculative  theology ;  but 
about  practical  duties  all  are  now  agreed.  Those  who  say  that 
a  man  is  justified  by  faith  without  works  are  careful  to  say  also 
that  a  faith  which  does  not  bear  fruit  in  good  works  is  not  a 
genuine  faith.  Taking  their  doctrine  from  what  they  conceive 
to  be  the  teaching  of  Paul,  they  do  not  dream  of  controverting 
his  instructions  to  Titus  (iii.  8),  '  These  things  I  will  that  thou 
affirm  constantly,  that  they  which  have  believed  in  God  might 
be  careful  to  maintain  good  works.'  But  when  Paul  asserted 
that  a  man  is  justified  by  faith  without  the  deeds  of  the  law, 
he  was  not  dealing  merely  with  the  question  what  relation  to 
justification  was  borne  by  the  works  which  all  allowed  ought 
to  be  performed.  There  was  also  the  urgent  practical  ques 
tion  whether  certain  works  of  the  law  needed  to  be  performed 
or  not.  One  party  said  (Acts  xv.  i),  'Except  ye  be  circum 
cised  after  the  manner  of  Moses,  ye  cannot  be  saved.'  Paul 
himself  said  (Gal.  v.  2),  '  Behold,  I  Paul  say  unto  you,  that  if 
ye  be  circumcised,  Christ  shall  profit  you  nothing.'  This  was 
no  speculative  question,  but  one  that  affected  the  practice  of 


XXIII.]  DATE   OF   THE   EPISTLE.  507 

«very  Gentile  convert.  As  long  as  controversy  on  this  subject 
was  raging,  it  is  inconceivable  that  anyone  should  discuss  the 
subject  of  justification,  and  be  absolutely  silent  on  this  great 
practical  question.  And  therefore  the  fact  that  when  James 
speaks  of  works,  he  seems  to  have  only  in  his  mind  such 
works  as  men  in  all  ages  have  accounted  to  be  good,  and 
makes  no  mention  of  the  specially  Mosaic  ordinances,  is  con 
vincing  proof  that  he  wrote  either  before  the  controversy 
concerning  the  universal  obligation  of  these  ordinances  had 
arisen,  or  else  after  it  had  died  out. 

Critics  of  the  sceptical  school  generally  choose  the  alter 
native  of  assigning  a  late  date  to  the  Epistle,  but  they  can 
hardly  find  one  late  enough  to  bring  the  Epistle  into  accord 
ance  with  Baur's  history  of  the  early  Christian  Church.  For 
according  to  Baur,  at  the  time  the  Epistles  to  the  Seven 
Churches  were  written,  that  is  to  say,  sometime  after  the 
death  of  the  historical  James,  the  heads  of  Jewish  Christianity 
regarded  Paul  as  an  enemy ;  and  hostility  to  Paul  survived 
down  to  the  time  of  publication  of  the  pseudo-Clementines. 
But  as  long  as  the  conflict  about  the  universal  obligation  of 
Mosaism  was  raging,  how  was  it  possible  that  a  Jewish  Chris 
tian  should  so  completely  ignore  it  as  the  writer  of  this 
Epistle  does— a  writer  who  seems  to  have  no  thought  of 
ceremonial  observance,  and  whose  sole  interest  is  to  maintain 
that  speculative  belief  is  worthless,  if  it  do  not  bear  fruit  in 
holiness  of  life  ?  I  could  imagine  an  opponent  of  Paul  affect 
ing  to  believe  that  that  Apostle's  denial  of  the  obligation  of 
the  Mosaic  law  included  a  denial  of  the  obligation  of  the  pre 
cepts  of  the  Decalogue,  and  insisting  on  these  precepts  with 
the  controversial  object  of  making  it  believed  that  his  adver 
sary  was  opposed  to  them.  But  no  one  can  read  the  Epistle 
of  James  without  feeling  that  the  writer  has  no  arriere  pensee 
in  his  assertion  of  the  claims  of  practical  morality :  for  he 
never  makes  the  smallest  attempt  under  cover  of  establishing 
the  obligation  of  the  moral  precepts  of  the  law,  to  insinuate 
the  duty  of  compliance  with  ceremonial  ordinances. 

I  consider  that  the  proofs  that  the  Epistle  was  written  be 
fore  the  destruction  of  Jerusalem,  by  one  who  had  personally 
been  a  hearer  of  our  Lord,  and  who  lived  while  His  second 


508  THE    EPISTLE    OF   ST.    JAMES. 

coming  was  still  regarded  as  likely  to  be  of  immediate  occur 
rence  (v.  8),  are  so  strong  as  to  force  us  to  reject  the  hypothesis 
that  it  was  written  by  someone  later  than  the  James  to  whom 
it  has  been  traditionally  ascribed.  An  objection  to  his  author 
ship  has  been  raised  on  account  of  the  goodness  of  the  Greek 
in  which  the  letter  is  written.  But  this  argument  is  of  no 
force.  For  though  we  should  not  beforehand  have  expected 
James  to  write  in  such  good  Greek,  we  see  plainly  that  the 
letter  was  written  by  a  Jew  ;  and  we  can  give  no  reason  why 
James  might  not  know  as  much  Greek  as  another  Jew.  The 
only  question,  then,  that  seems  to  me  worth  discussing  is, 
whether  it  was  written  late  or  early  in  that  Apostle's  life.  As 
I  hold  that  the  controversy  concerning  the  obligation  of  cir 
cumcision  on  Gentiles  was  one  of  very  short  duration,  I  could 
admit  the  Epistle  to  be  later  than  that  controversy,  and  yet  to 
have  been  written  by  James. 

The  date  we  assign  the  Epistle  depends  very  much  on  our 
determination  of  the  question  whether  or  not  James  had  read 
St.  Paul's  Epistles.  Several  critics  have  held  that  the  writer 
of  the  Epistle  we  are  considering  lived  so  late  as  to  have 
become  acquainted  with  an  entire  collection  of  Pauline 
Epistles,  and  with  the  Epistle  to  the  Hebrews  besides.  I 
have  already  said  that  it  seemed  to  me  probable  that  this  last 
Epistle  was  written  in  the  lifetime  of  James,  so  that  his  ac 
quaintance  with  it  involves  no  impossibility.  But  the  main 
proof  of  that  acquaintance  consists  in  the  fact  that  in  both 
letters  Rahab  the  harlot  is  cited  as  an  example  of  faith  ;  and 
though  the  coincidence  is  certainly  remarkable,  it  is  scarcely 
enough  to  establish  obligation  on  either  side,  ignorant  as  we 
are  of  the  examples  in  common  use  in  the  theological  discus 
sions  of  the  time.  In  fact  it  seems  to  me  that  one  who  had 
read  Hebrews  xi.  would  have  found  in  that  chapter  other 
examples  of  faith  more  tempting  for  discussion  than  the  case 
of  Rahab.  I  think  also  that  if  James  had  read  the  Epistle  to 
the  Hebrews,  there  would  have  been  some  reference  to  the 
high  priesthood  of  Christ,  which  is  so  copiously  dwelt  on  in 
that  letter.  And  in  every  respect  the  Epistle  to  the  Hebrews 
shows  signs  of  being  the  later  document  of  the  two.  All 
through  the  writer  shows  his  anxiety  lest  his  readers  should 


XXIII.]          AGREEMENT   OF    DOCTRINE   WITH   PAUL'S.  509 

be  tempted  to  apostasy,  of  which  there  evidently  had  been 
examples  even  in  men  who  had  been  partakers  of  the  mira 
culous  gifts  of  the  Holy  Ghost  (vi.  4) ;  but  the  persecution 
suffered  by  those  whom  James  addressed  appears  to  have 
been  both  less  severe  and  less  formal. 

The  coincidences*  alleged  to  prove  that  James  had  read  the 
Pauline  letters  seem  to  me  undeserving  of  attention,  except 
in  the  case  of  the  Epistle  to  the  Romans.  And  even  in  this 
case  there  are  considerations  which  make  us  hesitate  before 
regarding  these  coincidences  as  proofs  of  obligation.  If  James 
had  read  the  Epistle  to  the  Romans,  I  think  he  would  have 
avoided  the  appearance  of  verbal  contradiction  to  a  letter 
with  the  doctrine  of  which  he  is  in  such  substantial  agree 
ment.  It  is  not  merely  that  he  is  silent  as  to  the  bearing  on 
Gentile  obligation  of  the  question  of  justification  ;  but  on  the 
general  theological  question  he  is  quite  in  unison  with  St. 
Paul. 

The  representations  of  James  are  as  unfavourable  as  those 
of  Paul  to  the  idea  of  a  man  being  able  to  claim  salvation  as 
earned  by  the  merit  of  his  good  works.  'What  hast  thou  that 


*  Thus  we  may  dismiss  the  case  for  I  Thess.,  which  rests  on  the  common 
use  of  one  word,  6^6i<\r)pos  (i  Thess.  v.  23,  James  i.  4)  ;  for  Colossians, 
also  depending  on  one  word,  irapaAoyi^effdai  (Col.  ii.  4,  James  i.  22)  ;  and 
for  Philippians,  with  which  again  there  is  but  a  single  coincidence,  Kapirbs 
diKaioffvv-rjs  (Phil.  i.  n,  James  iii.  18),  the  resemblance  here  being  much 
closer  between  James  and  Heb.  xii.  n.  I  do  not  think  any  stress  can  be 
laid  on  the  formulae  apparently  in  common  use,  viz.  /j.-f)  ir\ava<Tde  (i  Cor. 
vi.  9,  xv.  33,  Gal.  vi.  7,  James  i.  16),  and  dAA'  <?pel  ns  (I  Cor.  xv.  35, 
James  ii.  18).  With  Romans,  again,  the  following  coincidences  deserve 
little  attention,  Trapa^drrjs  v6/j.ov  (Rom.  ii.  25,  James  ii.  ii),  vo^ov  TeAe?* 
(Rom.  ii.  27,  James  ii.  8),  the  phrases  being  such  as  independent  writers 
might  naturally  employ.  The  question  of  justification  had  probably  been 
discussed  in  the  Jewish  schools  ;  and  the  example  of  Abraham  was  one 
likely  to  have  been  brought  forward.  So  the  three  following  are  the 
only  cases  which  suggest  to  me  that  the  verbal  similarity  is  more  than 
accidental  :  — 


TJ  Q\tyis  vTrofj.ovriv  Karepyd^fTcu,  rj  8t  VTTOJJ.OV}]  $OKi/j.r]V  (Rom.  V.  3)  I 
TO  5oKifj.iov  v/j.oav  TTJS  Tricrrews  KaTepyd^erai  vTro/JLOff)v  (James  i.  3). 


v6p.ov  €V  ro7s  /j.f\f(ri  fj.ov,  a.VTicrrpareu6fj.fvoi>  (Rom.  vii.  23)  ; 

ruv  TjSoj/ttj/  vfj.cav  ruv  (rTparevofjLfvtuv  cV  ro7s  /j.f  \effiv  fytcDj/  (James  iv.  i). 


ou  yap  ol  aKpoaral  v6pov  SiKaioi  aAA.'  of  TTOITJTO)  v6fj.ov  (Rom.  ii.  13)  ; 
TrotTjTol  \6yov  Kal  fj.7)  IJLOVOV  aKpoarai  (James  i.  22). 


THE   EPISTLE   OF   ST.   JAMES.  [XXIII. 

thou  didst  not  receive  ?'  asks  Paul  (i  Cor.  iv.  7) :  «  Every  good 
gift  and  every  perfect  gift  is  from  above'  is  the  doctrine  of 
James  (i.  17).  The  latter  Apostle  teaches  also  that  if  a  man 
offend  in  one  point,  he  can  claim  no  merit  even  though  he 
have  fulfilled  all  the  other  commandments  of  the  law ;  the 
breach  of  that  one  precept  makes  him  guilty  of  all  (ii.  10).  It 
is  not  merely  the  sinful  act  which  brings  condemnation  ;  the 
sinful  desire  begins  a  course  which  ends  in  death  (i.  15). 
And  he  gives  the  name  of  sin  not  only  to  the  unlawful  act,, 
not  only  to  the  desire  from  which  that  act  sprang,  but  even 
to  the  omission  to  use  an  opportunity  presented  for  doing 
good  (iv.  17).  When  James  describes  the  law  whose  claims 
he  enforces,  by  the  title  'law  of  liberty'  (ii.  12),  he  shows 
himself  to  be  not  at  variance  with  Paul.  There  is  then  such 
a  real  identity  of  teaching  between  Paul  and  James,  that  I  am 
disposed  to  believe  that  if  James  had  known  the  Epistles  to 
the  Romans  and  Galatians,  he  would  have  guarded  against 
the  semblance  of  opposition  even  in  words.  Yet  I  do  not 
deny  that  he  probably  had  an  indirect  knowledge  of  the  doc 
trines  taught  by  Paul,  and  of  the  arguments  by  which  he  was 
wont  to  support  them.  For  the  doctrine  which  James  refutes 
has  a  certain  likeness  to  the  doctrine  taught  by  Paul,  though 
it  is  but  a  distortion  and  misrepresentation  of  it.  We  know, 
from  the  Acts  of  the  Apostles  (xv.  i),  that  St.  Paul,  in  the 
course  of  his  pastoral  labours,  met  with  certain  who  came 
down  from  James,  and  who  professed  to  speak  by  his  autho 
rity,  and  who  yet  taught,  concerning  the  absolute  necessity  of 
circumcision  and  other  legal  rites,  doctrines  which  St.  James 
subsequently  denied  ever  to  have  emanated  from  him  (ib.  19), 
Were  the  men  who  at  Antioch  misrepresented  the  teaching 
of  James  likely  to  give  a  fair  report  of  the  teaching  of  Paul 
when  they  returned  to  Jerusalem  ?  And  very  possibly  it  may 
have  been  true  that  there  were  some  who  professed  to  speak  as 
they  had  been  taught  by  Paul,  and  who  yet  used  language  im 
plying  that  a  barren  historical  belief  was  sufficient  for  justifi 
cation  ;  and  that  good  works  not  merely  were  to  be  excluded 
from  the  office  of  justifying,  but  might  without  injury  be 
absent  in  him  who  is  justified.  We  might  expect  that  such 
teaching  would  be  strenuously  opposed  by  James,  who 


XXIII.]  ITS   TEACHING   NOT   MERELY   JUDAIC.  511 

shows  that  he  had  so  carefully  treasured  up  his  Master's 
words,  and  who  probably  had  heard  Him  declare,  '  Not  every 
one  that  saith  unto  me,  Lord,  Lord,  shall  enter  into  the 
kingdom  of  heaven,  but  he  that  doeth  the  will  of  my  Father 
which  is  in  heaven.'  But  we  need  not  doubt  that  such 
teaching  would  have  been  equally  disowned  by  St.  Paul. 

If  I  am  right  in  thinking  that  the  Epistle  of  James  is  to  be 
regarded  as  a  document  belonging  to  a  very  early  age  of  the 
Christian  Church,  we  can  understand  why  specially  Christian 
doctrine  appears  here  in  a  less  developed  form  than  in  later 
inspired  writings,  and  why  its  teaching  has  more  affinity  with 
that  of  the  Old  Testament  prophets,*  and  with  the  teaching  of 
our  Blessed  Lord  Himself,  than  with  that  of  the  letters  of  St. 
Paul,  or  even  of  St.  Peter  and  St.  John.  Our  Lord  did  not, 
during  His  personal  ministry,  reveal  all  the  mysteries  of  His 
kingdom,  but  he  left  them  to  be  taught  to  His  Church  by  the 
Apostles  whom  His  Spirit  was  to  guide  into  all  the  truth.  Paul 
was  a  chosen  instrument  for  the  revelation  of  Christ's  Gospel ; 
and  it  might  well  be  that  there  was  a  portion  of  the  truth, 
the  need  for  dwelling  on  which  was  not  so  much  felt  by  the 
elder  Apostles  until  brought  home  to  them  by  Paul's  teaching, 
though  they  readily  owned  it  when  proclaimed  by  him. 

But  before  we  disparage  the  amount  of  specially  Christian 
teaching  which  St.  James's  Epistle  contains,  it  is  well  to  look 
into  the  matter  a  little  more  closely.  There  was  a  time  in 
the  Apostle's  life  when  he  was  but  a  pious  Jew.  It  appears 
from  St.  John's  Gospel  that  in  our  Lord's  lifetime  His  brethren 
did  not  believe  in  Him.  No  prophet  has  honour  in  his  own 
country,  and  the  members  of  our  Lord's  family  would  naturally 
be  the  slowest  to  own  in  Him  a  being  of  different  nature  from 
themselves.  But  St.  Paul  tells  us  (i  Cor.  xv.  7)  that  our 
Lord,  after  His  resurrection,  appeared  to  James  ;  and  it  is  not 
unnatural  to  ascribe  to  that  appearance  the  great  change 
which  ranged  James  among  those  who  owned  the  risen 


*  There  are  coincidences,  also,  with  the  book  of  Ecclesiasticus,  but 
they  seem  to  me  not  enough  to  furnish  a  decisive  proof  that  that  book  has 
been  used.  One  of  the  most  striking  is  Ecclus.  xv.  II,  12  :  MT?  cnrjjs  on 
dia  Kvpiov  a.TT€ffTTf]V,  &  yap  (/mi err) (rev  ov  iroiT}<rtis.  MT?  efaris  on  avros  /xe 
€ir\dvrjo~ei',  ov  yap  xP*'iav  *X6t  Bv5/jbs  afj.apTu\ov.  (Compare  James  i.  13). 


512  THE    EPISTLE    OF   ST.    JAMES.  [XXIII. 

Saviour  as  the  great  object  of  their  faith.  In  the  inscription 
of  his  Epistle  he  claims  no  honour  from  his  human  relation 
ship  with  his  Master,  but  describes  himself  as  the  servant  of 
God  and  of  our  Lord  Jesus  Christ.  What  a  change  is  it  that 
where  once  he  might  have  been  entitled  to  bear  the  name  of 
brother,  now  he  only  dares  to  call  himself  the  slave  ;  and  in 
his  form  of  expression  puts  this  new  Master  whom  he  owned 
on  the  level  of  God,  'James,  of  God  and  of  the  Lord  Jesus 
Christ  the  slave.'  Christ's  is  the  worthy  name  which  he  is 
proud  to  bear  (ii.  7)  ;  Christ  the  great  object  of  the  faith 
common  to  him  with  those  to  whom  he  writes,  which  is  de 
scribed  as  the  '  faith  of  our  Lord  Jesus  Christ'  (ii.  i).  He  is 
the  '  Lord  of  glory,'  and  His  second  coming  the  longing  hope 
of  His  Church.  They  must  be  exhorted  to  wait  patiently  for 
it  as  the  husbandman  waits  patiently  for  the  precious  fruit  of 
the  earth  (v.  7).  The  purpose  of  that  coming,  as  expected  by 
James  and  his  readers  alike,  was  that  which  we  express  in  the 
words,  '  We  believe  that  Thou  shalt  come  to  be  our  Judge.' 
'  The  judge  standeth  before  the  door,'  cries  St. James.  'Stab- 
lish  your  hearts:  for  the  coming  of  the  Lord  draweth  nigh' 
(v.  8,  9).  And  while  yet  separated  from  His  Church,  Christ 
is  still  its  ruler  and  the  source  of  its  supernatural  power. 
Miracles  of  healing  were  looked  for,  but  it  was  in  His  name 
that  the  sick  were  to  be  anointed  ;  it  was  He  who  should  raise 
them  up,  and  through  whom  they  were  to  obtain  the  forgive 
ness  of  their  sins  (v.  14,  15).  The  man  whose  faith  we  have 
here  described  was  clearly  no  mere  Jew,  but  one  whose  whole 
religious  life  had  Jesus  for  its  centre  and  foundation. 

But  although  St.  James  was  very  much  more  than  a  pious 
Jew,  it  is  not  uninteresting  to  study  him  in  that  character. 
There  have  been  those  of  late  years,  both  unbelievers  and 
Christians,  who  have  written  lives  of  our  Lord,  and  have 
striven  to  form  a  conception  of  that  earthly  life  which,  if 
Jesus  be  looked  on  only  as  an  historical  character,  is  still  one 
of  the  most  important  in  all  its  results  for  the  human  race. 
Well,  if  we  wish  to  know  the  influences  under  which  Jesus 
of  Nazareth  was  brought  up,  what  better  evidence  can  we 
have  than  that  which  can  be  drawn  from  the  character  of 
another  member  of  the  same  family,  brought  up  with  the  same 


XXIII.]  MORAL   EFFECTS   OF   CHRISTIANITY.  513 

surroundings,  a  character  which  we  know,  not  only  from  the 
report  of  others,  but  as  it  reveals  itself  in  his  own  writings  ? 
The  very  fact  that  there  is  less  of  distinctively  Christian  doc 
trine  in  St.  James  than  in  the  other  Epistles  makes  it  possible 
for  us  to  see  in  him,  who  seems  to  have  been  least  changed 
by  his  Christianity,  a  type  of  what  those  pious  men  were 
among  the  Jews  who,  before  our  Lord's  coming,  waited  for 
the  consolation  of  Israel. 

We  see  then  in  James,  a  man  of  few  words,  slow  to  speak, 
deeply  alive  to  the  guilt  of  sins  of  the  tongue,  counting  the 
religion  vain  of  the  man  who  cannot  bridle  his  tongue,  meek, 
slow  to  wrath,  humble,  a  hater  of  worldliness,  whose  sympa 
thies  are  with  the  poor  of  this  world,  and  whose  indignation 
is  excited  when  they  are  scorned  in  the  house  of  God,  a  man 
of  prayer,  full  of  faith  in  the  efficacy  of  a  righteous  man's 
fervent  prayer,  zealous  for  the  law,  yet  not  for  mere  ceremonial 
observance,  imbued  with  the  spirit  of  the  prophet's  maxim 
that  God  will  have  mercy  and  not  sacrifice,  and  holding  that 
the  true  flpiyo-Keia  is  to  visit  the  fatherless  and  widows  in  their 
affliction,  and  to  keep  oneself  unspotted  from  the  world.  Before 
we  disparage  the  teaching  of  such  a  man,  let  us  beware  lest 
we  disparage  the  teaching  of  our  Lord  Himself,  with  whom 
his  character  has  much  in  common,  and  the  topics  of  whose 
ordinary  discourses  seem  not  to  have  been  very  different. 

If  any  are  inclined  to  think  that  too  much  of  the  Epistle 
of  James  is  occupied  with  moral  precepts,  and  that  by  taking 
these  for  granted  the  space  they  fill  might  have  been  gained 
for  doctrinal  instruction,  such  persons  ought  to  be  reminded 
how  needful  this  moral  teaching  was  at  the  time  when  the 
Epistle  was  written,  and  how  much  of  the  success  of  Chris 
tianity  was  due  to  the  pains  which  its  teachers  took  in  in 
culcating  lessons  which  seem  to  us  commonplace.  Some 
Christian  apologists  have  perhaps  stated  too  strongly  the 
contrast  between  Christian  and  heathen  morality  ;  not  giving 
due  credit  to  the  excellence  of  some  virtuous  heathen,  and  too 
literally  taking  the  representations  of  satirists  as  fair  pictures 
of  the  general  condition  of  society.  Yet  the  historical  student 
must  own  that  since  the  publication  of  the  Gospel  the  general 
standard  of  morality  has  been  raised.  For  in  heathen  times 

2  L 


5 14  THE   EPISTLE   OF   ST.   JAMES.  [XXIII. 

a  man  would  have  been  regarded  as  of  exceptional  goodness 
if  he  practised  those  homely  duties  which  an  ordinary  Chris 
tian  gentleman  would  now  count  himself  disgraced  if  he  failed 
in.  When  Pliny  set  himself  to  inquire  what  was  the  '  sacra- 
mentum'  administered  to  Christians  at  their  meetings  before 
daylight,  the  information  given  him  no  doubt  truly  told  him 
the  nature  of  the  instructions  given  on  these  occasions.  And 
what  we  learn  that  the  disciples  then  pledged  themselves  to 
was  what  seems  to  us  very  elementary  morality,  viz.  that 
they  were  not  to  rob  or  steal,  not  to  commit  adultery,  not  to 
break  their  word,  and  if  the  money  of  others  were  entrusted 
to  them,  not  to  appropriate  it  to  themselves.  It  was,  no 
doubt,  a  pleasant  exaggeration  of  Juvenal  to  represent  (Sat. 
xiii.)  the  faithful  return  of  a  friend's  deposit  as  in  his  time 
such  a  rarity,  that  its  occurrence  might  be  regarded  as  a  por 
tentous  event,  demanding  the  offering  of  an  expiatory  sacri 
fice.  Yet  we  need  not  doubt  that  by  the  Christian  discipline 
the  honesty  of  the  disciples  was  raised  to  a  marked  supe 
riority  over  the  ordinary  heathen  level,  and  that  a  Christian 
came  to  be  known  as  one  whose  word  was  as  good  as  another 
man's  oath,  who  would  not  lie,  nor  cheat,  nor  take  an  unfair 
advantage.  We  are  warranted  in  thinking  this,  because 
Justin  Martyr  (Apol.  i.  16)  enumerates  among  the  common 
causes  of  conversions  to  Christianity  the  impression  which 
the  honesty  of  Christians  made  on  those  who  did  business 
with  them. 

We  have  further  evidence  of  the  low  state  of  heathen 
morality  in  another  class  of  precepts,  which  we  find  much 
dwelt  on  in  documents  later  than  the  Epistle  we  are  consider 
ing.  In  the  Teaching  of  the  Twelve  Apostles  (ii.  2),  for  instance, 
the  disciple  is  instructed  that  he  must  neither  destroy  the  life 
of  his  unborn  child  nor  kill  it  after  birth  ;  and  that  he  must 
not  practise  abominations  which  in  those  days  were  confessed 
without  shame,  but  which  we  now  loathe  to  speak  of.  I  think 
that  the  nearly  complete  absence  of  warnings  against  sins  of 
the  flesh  in  the  Epistle  of  James  is  evidence  both  that  this 
Epistle  was  addressed  to  Jews,  and  that  in  such  matters  Jew 
ish  morality  was  higher  than  that  of  the  heathen  world.  St. 
Paul,  in  his  letters  addressed  to  Churches  in  which  Gentiles 


XXIII.]    PRACTICAL   EXHORTATION    NOT   SUPERFLUOUS.         515 

predominated,  finds  it  impossible  to  be  silent  on  such  topics. 
How  much  the  moral  standard  of  society  was  raised  by  these 
instructions,  and  by  the  Christian  rule  of  expelling  as  a  dis 
grace  to  their  community  those  who  transgressed  them,  we 
have  evidence  in  the  fact  that  three  centuries  later  the 
Emperor  Julian  is  scandalized  by  the  revelation  as  to  the 
previous  character  of  Paul's  converts,  made  in  the  confession 
(i  Cor.  vi.  n)  '  such  were  some  of  you'  (see  Cyril.  Alex.  adv. 
Jul.  vii.). 

In  our  times,  as  well  as  in  his  own,  sayings  of  St.  Paul 
have  been  caught  up  and  distorted.  It  has  been  thought  as 
needless  to  dwell  on  those  fruits  of  faith  on  which  he  was 
always  so  careful  to  enlarge,  as  if  experience  never  showed 
us  the  possibility  that  there  might  be  what  St.  James  called 
a  '  dead  faith.'  Men  have  read  with  impatience  St.  James's 
inculcation  of  holiness,  purity,  unworldliness,  meekness,  as  if 
these  lessons  obscured  the  teaching  of  that  which  was  really 
important.  But  no  true  disciple  of  Paul  can  be  offended  at 
the  proportion  which  practical  exhortation  occupies  in  the 
Epistle  of  James.  For  Paul  himself  put  the  production  of 
holy  living  in  the  place  of  pre-eminence,  as  the  end  for  which 
the  whole  system  was  devised  :  '  Christ  gave  himself  for  us, 
that  he  might  redeem  us  from  all  iniquity,  and  purify  unto 
himself  a  peculiar  people,  zealous  of  good  works'  (Tit.  ii.  14). 
Christianity  gave  men  new  motives  and  new  powers  for  attain 
ing  holiness.  But  if  they  did  not  attain  it,  they  had  learned 
their  religion  in  vain.* 

*  The  Venerable  Bede,  in  his  prologue  to  the  Catholic  Epistles,  printed 
by  Cave  (Hist.  Lit.  i.  614),  says  that  the  first  place  is  given  to  the  Epistle 
of  James  because  he  was  bishop  of  Jerusalem,  whence  the  Gospel  preach 
ing  issued  forth,  and  because  he  wrote  to  the  Twelve  Tribes,  among 
whom  were  the  first  believers.  From  this  fact  that  the  Epistle  of  James 
is  placed  as  first  of  the  Catholic  Epistles,  we  may  infer  that  this  collec 
tion  was  formed  in  the  East,  and  at  a  time  so  early  that  the  claims  of  James 
to  the  first  place  in  the  Church  were  still  remembered.  If  it  had  been 
formed  in  the  West,  the  Epistles  of  Peter  would  have  come  first,  as  they 
actually  do  in  the  Claromontane  list  (see  p.  473). 

In  the  first  printed  edition  of  the  Peshitto,  there  is  a  heading  describing 
the  three  Catholic  Epistles  which  only  it  contains,  viz.,  James,  i  Peter, 
and  i  John,  as  written  by  the  three  witnesses  of  the  Transfiguration.  But 
no  MS.  authority  has  been  found  for  this  identification  of  the  James  of  the 
Epistle  with  the  son  of  Zebedee ;  and  this  seems  to  rest  solely  on  the 
authority  of  the  editor,  Moses  of  Mardin. 

2  L  2 


XXIV. 

THE  EPISTLE  OF   ST.  JUDE. 


IN  my  first  lecture  I  said  (p.  12)  that  I  intended  my  inves 
tigation  to  be  purely  historical,  and  that  I  meant  to  dis 
cuss  the  evidence  as  to  the  authorship  of  the  books  of  the 
New  Testament  in  the  same  way  that  I  should  do  if  the  sub 
ject  of  inquiry  were  any  profane  histories.  By  this  course  I 
gained  the  advantage  of  being  able  to  set  aside  objections  to 
the  reception  of  our  books  drawn  from  the  miraculous  charac 
ter  of  their  contents ;  but  I  debarred  myself  from  using  the 
authority  of  the  Church  in  fixing  the  Canon.  This  is  not  the 
time  for  discussing  some  very  important  questions  of  prin 
ciple,  such  as  whether  the  authority  of  Scripture  depends  on 
that  of  the  Church ;  whether  the  Church  has  made  any  deter 
mination  on  the  subject,  and  if  so,  when  and  how ;  and 
whether  it  is  possible  for  her  to  err  in  such  determination.  I 
have  been  able  to  postpone  such  questions,  because,  plainly, 
if  the  decisions  of  the  Church  be  correct,  they  will  not  be 
opposed  to  the  results  obtained  by  honest  historical  investi 
gation.  But  I  wish  to  point  out  that  there  is  an  important 
difference  with  regard  to  the  assent  we  give  when  we  adopt 
a  Canon  of  Scripture  merely  on  the  authority  of  the  Church, 
and  when  we  do  so  as  the  result  of  historical  inquiry.  In  the 
former  case  all  the  books  of  the  Canon  have  equal  claims  on 
our  acceptance;  if  the  Church  have  decided  in  favour  of  Bel 
and  the  Dragon,  that  must  be  received  ex  animo  as  much  as 
the  Book  of  Genesis  ;  if  the  verse  of  the  Three  heavenly  Wit 
nesses  be  part  of  the  text  adopted  by  the  Church,  it  has  the 
same  authority  as  the  verse,  *  In  the  beginning  was  the  Word.' 
On  the  other  hand,  historical  inquiry  ordinarily  leads  to  results 
which  we  hold  with  unequal  confidence.  For  some  things 
the  evidence  is  so  convincing  as  to  draw  from  us  that  un- 


XXIV.]    THE  CANON  IN  THE  FOURTH  CENTURY.       517 

doubting  assent  to  which  we  commonly  give  the  name  of 
certainty ;  other  results  may  be  pronounced  highly  probable, 
others  probable  in  a  less  degree ;  in  some  cases  our  verdict 
may  not  reach  beyond  a  '  non  liquet.' 

Now  there  are  some  who  in  theory  reject  the  principle  that 
the  authority  of  Scripture  depends  on  that  of  the  Church,  but 
who  show  that  they  have  in  practice  adopted  it,  by  their  reluct 
ance  to  recognize  the  possibility  that  there  may  be  inequality 
in  the  claims  of  different  books  which  we  have  been  accus 
tomed  to  recognize  alike  as  Scripture.  In  laying  before  you 
the  evidence  for  our  books,  I  cannot  but  feel  that  to  some  of 
you  it  will  be  a  disappointment  to  learn  that  in  the  two  or 
three  last  cases  we  have  to  examine,  the  testimony  is  much 
less  copious  than  in  those  which  previously  came  before  us ; 
and  a  shock  to  discover  that  in  any  case  it  can  be  such  as  to 
leave  room  for  doubt.  I  can  only  repeat  that  the  ordinary 
condition  of  historical  inquiry  is  to  arrive  at  results  which 
must  be  accepted  with  unequal  confidence.  The  Church  of 
the  nineteenth  century  has  no  reason  to  complain,  if  she  is  not 
better  off  in  this  respect  than  the  Church  of  the  fourth  century. 
Although  in  that  age  the  great  bulk  of  the  books  of  our  New 
Testament  Canon  were  received  with  universal  assent,  there 
were  a  few  about  which  the  most  learned  men  then  hesitated. 
I  have  already  told  you  of  the  two  classes  into  which  Eusebius 
divided  our  New  Testament  books.  Whatever  doubts  Euse 
bius  entertained  with  regard  to  his  '  antilegomena'  are  re 
peated  fifty  years  later  by  St.  Jerome  ;  and  at  the  beginning 
of  the  fifth  century  St.  Augustine  still  puts  books  received 
only  by  some  Churches  into  a  different  category  from  those 
received  by  all.  For  he  says  :  '  In  judging  of  the  canonical 
Scriptures  the  student  will  hold  this  course,  that  he  prefer 
those  which  are  received  by  all  Catholic  Churches  to  those 
which  some  do  not  receive ;  of  those  again  which  are  not 
received  by  all,  he  will  prefer  those  which  more,  and  more 
influential,  Churches  receive  to  those  which  are  held  by 
Churches  fewer  in  number  or  inferior  in  authority'  (De  Doctr. 
Chr.  ii.  12). 

Now  I  will  frankly  tell  you  my  own  opinion,  that  since  the 
end  of  the  fourth  century  no  new  revelation  has  been  made 


518  THE   EPISTLE   OF  ST.   JUDE.  [XXIV. 

to  enlighten  the  Church  on  the  subject  of  the  Canon ;  and 
therefore  that  we  can  have  no  infallible  certainty  on  matters 
about  which  learned  men  of  that  age  thought  they  had  not 
evidence  to  warrant  a  confident  assertion.  On  the  other 
hand,  when,  after  long  discussion,  one  opinion  gains  the 
victory,  and  establishes  itself  so  as  to  become  a  universally 
accepted  belief,  that  itself  is  a  fact  which  is  entitled  to  have 
some  weight.  And  in  some  cases  we  can  clearly  see  good 
reason  for  the  recognition  of  documents  questioned  in  the 
fourth  century.  Thus,  the  authority  of  the  great  majority  of 
the  books  of  our  Canon,  resting,  as  it  does,  on  a  general  con 
sensus  of  historical  testimony,  stands  on  a  much  firmer  basis 
than  if  it  depended  on  any  early  formal  decision  of  a  council, 
concerning  which  we  might  be  in  doubt  as  to  the  grounds  on 
which  the  decision  was  made,  as  to  the  competence  of  the 
men  who  made  it,  and  as  to  possible  opposing  testimony 
which  that  interference  of  conciliar  authority  might  have 
prevented  from  reaching  us. 

In  the  case  of  the  two  Palestinian  documents  which  have 
come  before  us  in  the  last  and  in  this  lecture,  we  find  it  easy 
to  explain  why  there  should  be  some  inferiority  of  testimony. 
If  it  had  not  been  for  the  calamities  which  befell  the  Jewish 
people,  it  is  quite  conceivable  that  Christianity  might  have 
developed  itself  in  some  form  similar  to  that  in  which  the 
pseudo-Clementines  present  its  early  history,  and  that  the 
head  of  the  parent  Church  of  Jerusalem  might  have  been 
generally  recognized  as  the  ruler  and  lawgiver  of  Christen 
dom.  But  there  came  first  the  Jewish  rebellion,  ending  in 
the  destruction  of  Jerusalem  by  Titus.  After  that,  there  still 
were  Jews  who  clung  to  the  site  of  the  ancient  glories  of  their 
nation,  and  Christianity  had  its  representatives  among  them 
in  a  line  of  Jewish  successors  to  James.  But  then  came  the 
terrible  insurrection  under  Barcochba  in  the  reign  of  Hadrian, 
on  the  suppression  of  which  the  very  name  of  Jerusalem  was 
abolished,  and  Jews  were  forbidden  to  approach  the  spot; 
and  though  Christians  were  to  be  found  in  the  new  city,  JElia 
Capitolina,  which  then  replaced  Jerusalem,  they  were  of  ne 
cessity  governed  by  Gentile  rulers  (Euseb.  iv.  6).  We  learn 
from  Justin  Martyr  (Apol.  i.  31)  that  Barcochba  during  his 


XXIV.]        EXTERNAL  EVIDENCE  ABUNDANT.          519 

possession  of  power  fanatically  persecuted  the  Christians,  and 
it  is  to  be  believed  that  after  his  death  there  remained  great 
exasperation  of  feeling,  indisposing  men  of  Jewish  birth  to 
embrace  Christianity.  Meanwhile  the  Gentile  Churches 
nourished  and  multiplied,  and  naturally  were  thenceforward 
little  influenced  by  Jewish  Christianity  and  its  traditions.  So 
we  have  no  cause  for  surprise  that  the  circulation  enjoyed  by 
the  two  Palestinian  letters,  the  Epistles  of  James  and  Jude, 
was  so  limited  as  it  appears  to  have  been. 

But  what  is  really  surprising  is,  that  of  these  two,  it  is  the 
letter  of  the  less  celebrated  man  which  seems  to  have  been 
the  better  known,  and  to  have  obtained  the  wider  circulation. 
The  external  testimony  to  the  Epistle  of  James  is  compara 
tively  weak,  and  it  is  only  the  excellence  of  the  internal 
evidence  which  removes  all  hesitation.  Now  the  case  is  just 
the  reverse  with  regard  to  Jude's  Epistle.  There  is  very  little 
in  the  letter  itself  to  enable  us  to  pronounce  a  confident 
opinion  as  to  the  date  of  composition  ;  but  it  is  recognized  by 
writers  who  are  silent  with  respect  to  the  Epistle  of  James. 
I  have  given  (p.  493)  evidence  that  Clement  of  Alexandria, 
whose  knowledge  of  the  Epistle  of  James  is  disputable,  used 
that  of  Jude.  Besides  what  is  there  quoted  from  thelfypoty- 
poseis.  Clement  cites  the  Epistle  elsewhere  (Paed.  iii.  8,  p.  280, 
Potter:  Strom,  iii.  2,  p.  515).  The  Muratorian  Fragment  re 
cognizes  it,  andTertullian  (De  cult.  fern.  3),  labouring  to  estab 
lish  the  authority  of  the  Book  of  Enoch,  adds  as  a  crowning 
argument  that  it  is  quoted  by  '  the  Apostle  Jude/  We  may 
infer,  therefore,  that  Jude's  Epistle  was  an  unquestioned  part 
of  Tertullian's  Canon.  Origen  repeatedly  quotes  the  Epistle, 
though  on  one  occasion  he  implies  that  it  was  not  universally 
received.*  I  have  quoted  (pp.  475, 492)  what  is  said  by  Euse- 
bius,  in  which  he  seems  scarcely  to  do  justice  to  the  use  of 
this  Epistle  by  his  predecessors.  Of  these,  in  addition  to 
Clement  and  Origen,  may  be  named  Malchion,  who,  in  a 
passage  preserved  by  Eusebius  himself  (vii.  30),  clearly  em- 

*  In  Matt.  torn.  x.  17  ;  xiii.  27  ;  xv.  27  ;  xvii.  30.  In  the  first  of  these 
passages  he  calls  the  Epistle  one  of  few  lines,  but  full  of  powerful  words  of 
heavenly  grace.  In  the  second  he  interprets  the  TeTTjprj/ieVois  in  v.  I,  of 
the  work  of  guardian  angels.  It  is  only  in  the  last  of  them  that  he  uses  the 
formula  *  if  any  receive  the  Epistle  of  Jude.' 


520  THE    EPISTLE    OF   ST.   JUDE.  [XXIV. 

ploys  the  Epistle.  It  is  included  in  the  list  of  Athanasius 
(Fest.  Ep.  39).  Lucifer  of  Cagliari  (about  357),  quoting  it, 
describes  Jude  as  '  gloriosus  apostolus  frater  Jacobi  apostoli' 
(see mfra,  p.  525);  and  it,  as  well  as  the  other  Catholic  Epis 
tles,  was  commented  on  by  Didymus  of  Alexandria,  who  died 
towards  the  end  of  the  fourth  century.  Didymus  mentions, 
but  with  disapproval,  opposition  made  to  the  Epistle  on 
account  of  the  verse  about  the  body  of  Moses  (Galland,  vi. 
294).  Jerome  says:  *  Jude,  the  brother  of  James,  has  left  a 
short  Epistle,  which  is  one  of  the  seven  Catholic.  And,  be 
cause  in  it  he  draws  a  testimony  from  the  apocryphal  Book 
of  Enoch,  it  is  rejected  by  very  many.  However,  it  has  now 
gained  authority  by  antiquity  and  use,  and  is  counted  among 
the  sacred  Scriptures'  (De  Viris  Illust.  4). 

It  is  plain  from  the  evidence  adduced  that  Jude's  Epistle 
early  obtained  a  currency  in  the  West,  which  was  not  gained 
until  a  later  period  by  the  Epistle  of  James.  On  the  other 
hand,  Jude's  Epistle  is  wanting  in  the  Peshitto.  Several 
quotations  of  it  are  indeed  found  in  the  works  of  Ephraem 
Syrus,  but  only  in  those  which  have  been  translated  into 
Greek  (n.  pp.  154,  161  ;  in.  p.  61);  and  there  is  room  for 
doubt  whether  this  use  of  Jude  was  made  by  Ephraem  him 
self,  or  introduced  by  the  translator.* 

Notwithstanding  the  wide  circulation  of  Jude's  Epistle  in 
early  times,  I  find  no  reason  to  think  that  our  earliest  authori 
ties  knew  more  either  about  its  author  or  the  occasion  of  its 
composition  than  they  could  learn  from  the  document  itself. 
We  need  not  doubt  that  it  is  a  real  relic  of  the  first  age  of  the 
Church,  both  because  there  is  no  trace  of  any  motive  such 
as  might  inspire  a  forgery,  and  also  because  a  forger  would 
certainly  have  inscribed  his  production  with  some  more  dis- 


*  The  Peshitto  list  only  containing  three  Catholic  Epistles  is  referred 
to  in  the  Iambics  of  Amphilochius  of  Iconium,  who  died  about  395 
(Galland,  vi.  495): — 

Ka9o\iicci,s  eVi(TToAcky 
rives  fJLfv  €7rra  tyaffiv,  ol  Se  rpels  /mSvas 
Xpvvai.  SfXfffOai,  T^V  'IctKcaftov  jj.lav, 
fj.iav  Se  Herpov,  TT)V  T'  'iwdvvov /uiay. 
rives  8e  TOS  rpe?s,  Kal  irpbs  ai/rals  T&S  5v» 
Tlerpov  Se'xovTot,  r^v  'lovSa  8'  €&56fjLT)r. 


XXIV.]  ITS  AUTHOR.  521 

tinguished  name.  The  letter  professes  to  come  from  '  Jude, 
a  servant  of  Jesus  Christ,  and  brother  of  James.'  We  may 
regard  it  as  certain  that  the  James  here  intended  is  the  well- 
known  James  who  presided  over  the  Church  of  Jerusalem, 
and  thus  that  the  Epistle  clearly  belongs  to  the  Palestinian 
section  of  the  Church.  This  James  is,  no  doubt,  also  he  who  is 
called  the  Lord's  brother  (Gal.  i.  19).  Now  the  names  of  our 
Lord's  brethren  are  given  (Matt.  xiii.  55)  as  James,  Joseph, 
Simon,  and  Judas;  and  in  the  parallel  passage  of  Mark  (vi.  3) 
as  James,  Joses,  Judas,  and  Simon.  We  may  take  for  granted 
that  the  Judas  here  named  is  the  author  of  our  Epistle.  We 
may  also  believe  that  it  is  the  same  Jude  who  is  mentioned 
in  a  tradition  preserved  by  Hegesippus  (Euseb.  iii.  20),  that 
informers  attempted  to  excite  the  jealousy  of  Domitian  against 
two  of  our  Lord's  family,  *  grandsons  of  Jude,  who  is  said  to 
have  been  his  brother  after  the  flesh.'*  On  being  questioned 
by  the  Emperor  as  to  their  property,  they  told  him  that  they 
had  no  money,  and  possessed  only  a  small  farm,  which  they 
owned  in  common  and  cultivated  with  their  own  hands,  its 
value  not  being  more  than  9000  denarii.  Then  they  showed 
him  their  hands,  and  when  he  saw  them  horny  with  continual 
toil  he  was  convinced  of  the  truth  of  the  story.  As  for  the 
kingdom  which  they  were  accused  of  expecting,  they  assured 
him  that  it  was  no  earthly  kingdom,  but  a  heavenly  one ; 
when  Christ  should  come  at  the  end  of  the  world  to  judge  the 
quick  and  dead.  On  this  the  Emperor,  regarding  them  as 
beneath  his  jealousy,  dismissed  them  ;  and  they  survived  to  the 
reign  of  Trajan,  held  in  honour  in  the  Churches,  both  on  ac 
count  of  this  their  confession  and  of  their  kindred  to  our  Lord. 
There  is  a  Judas,  who  may  or  may  not  be  another,  in  the 
list  of  the  Apostles,  as  given  by  St.  Luke  (vi.  16,  Acts  i.  13), 
and  recognized  by  St.  John  (xiv.  22).  This  Judas  occupies 
the  place  of  one  who  in  the  lists  of  Matthew  (x.  3)  and 
Mark  (iii.  18),  is  called  Lebbeus,  or  Thaddeus.f  I  may  re- 

*  In  a  newly  recovered  fragment  of  Philip  of  Side  (see  p.  319),  it  is  stated 
that  Hegesippus  gives  the  names  of  these  grandsons,  viz.,  Zocer  and  James. 

t  There  is  a  question  of  reading  here  which  I  will  not  delay  to  discuss  ; 
but  it  is  important  to  mention  that  in  Matt.  x.  3  there  is  a  well-attested 
old  Latin  reading:  'Judas  Zelotes,'  instead  of  Thaddseus,  and  that  our 


522  THE   EPISTLE   OF   ST.   JUDE.  [XXIV. 

mind  you  in  passing  that  in  the  Abgar  legend  (see  p.  355) 
Thaddeus  is  represented  not  as  an  Apostle,  but  as  one  of  the 
Seventy,  and  that  he  is  not  called  Judas — a  name  which  is 
treated  as  belonging  to  Thomas.  St.  Luke  describes  the 
Apostle  Judas  as  'lou'Sas  'laKufiov ;  and  though  the  natural 
translation  of  the  words  is  '  Jude,  the  son  of  James/  the 
Authorized  Version  renders  Jude  the  brother  of  James,  no 
doubt  because  the  Apostle  was  identified  with  the  author  of 
our  Epistle.  But  it  is  very  doubtful  whether  this  identifica 
tion  can  be  maintained.  The  author  of  the  Epistle  not  only 
does  not  call  himself  an  Apostle  in  his  inscription,  but  seems 
to  distinguish  himself  from  the  Apostles  (v.  17). 

On  the  question,  what  we  are  to  understand  by  'the 
brethren  of  our  Lord,'  you  ought  to  consult  Bishop  Light- 
foot's  Dissertation  II.,  appended  to  his  Commentary  on 
Galatians.  We  have,  I  think,  to  choose  between  the  hypo 
thesis,  that  these  •  brethren'  were  sons  of  Joseph  by  a  former 
wife,  or  that  they  were  near  kinsmen  who,  according  to 
Hebrew  usage,  might  be  called  brethren.  It  is  always  best 
to  confess  ignorance  when  we  have  not  the  means  of  certain 
knowledge,  and  it  does  not  seem  to  me  that  we  have  it  in  this 
instance.  I  believe  that  Epiphanius,  Jerome,  and  most  others, 
who  are  appealed  to  as  authorities,  had  no  more  means  of  real 
knowledge  than  ourselves.  The  arguments  on  both  sides 
which  seem  to  me  really  deserving  of  attention  are  the  fol 
lowing  :  (i)  The  manner  in  which  the  four  brothers  are  men 
tioned  in  Matt.  xiii.  55,  would  scarcely  be  natural  if  they  were 
not  members  of  the  same  household  as  our  Lord.  (2)  The 
Protevangelium,  and  the  Gospel  according  to  St.  Peter  (as 
we  know  from  Origen's  Commentary  on  Matt.  xiii.  55),  repre 
sent  these  brethren  as  sons  of  Joseph  by  a  former  wife.  (3) 
Hegesippus  describing  Simeon,  the  second  Bishop  of  Jeru 
salem,  as  our  Lord's  cousin,  never  calls  him  brother  of  our 
Lord  as  he  does  James  and  Jude.  These,  being  second- 
century  authorities,  may  be  supposed  likely  to  speak  from 

Epistle  is  described  as  '  Judae  Zelotis'  in  the  catalogue  of  canonical  books 
commonly  ascribed  to  Gelasius,  but  which,  according  to  Thiel  (Epp.  Rom. 
Pont.,  p.  58),  is  rather  to  be  referred  to  Pope  Damasus.  But  concerning 
this  list,  see  Westcott's  Bible  in  the  Church,  p.  195. 


XXIV.]  THE    BRETHREN    OF   OUR   LORD.  523 

knowledge.  But  it  is  possible  that  all  three  may  be  too  late 
for  such  knowledge ;  and  a  difficulty  arises  from  the  fact  of 
Simeon's  election  as  second  Bishop  of  Jerusalem.  For  Jude's 
Epistle  exhibits  much  greater  corruption  of  morals  among 
professing  Christians  than  that  of  James,  so  that  it  is 
natural  to  think  that  Jude  survived  James ;  and  since  his 
kinship  to  our  Lord  appears  to  have  been  a  main  reason 
for  the  choice  of  Simeon,  the  question  arises,  If  Jude  were 
known  as  a  '  brother  of  our  Lord,'  and  Simeon  not,  would 
not  the  choice  have  fallen  on  Jude,  whose  Epistle  shows 
him  to  have  had,  besides  the  claims  of  birth,  those  also 
of  piety  and  ability  ?  On  the  other  hand,  the  choice  of 
Simeon  would  be  intelligible  if  he  were  Jude's  elder  brother  ; 
and  we  know  (Matt.  xiii.  55)  that  Jude  had  a  brother  called 
Simon. 

Again,  we  find  (Matt,  xxvii.  56)  that  there  were  a  James 
and  Joses  who  were  not  the  sons  of  a  deceased  wife  of  Joseph, 
but  who  had  a  mother  living  at  the  time  of  the  Crucifixion. 
It  is,  no  doubt,  possible  that  the  three  'brethren  of  our  Lord,' 
James,  Joses,  and  Simon,  had  three  cousins — brothers  also — 
named  James,  Joses,  and  Simon ;  but  the  more  natural  sup 
position  is,  that  the  same  James  and  Joses  are  spoken  of  in 
both  places. 

Weighing  the  arguments  on  both  sides,  I  think  the  pre 
ponderance  is  on  the  side  of  those  for  the  adoption  of  the 
theory  that  these  'brethren'  were  sons  of  Joseph.  This  is  as 
far  as  we  know,  the  older  opinion ;  for  Lightfoot  has  been 
successful  in  showing  that  the  'cousin'  theory  cannot  be 
traced  higher  than  St.  Jerome.  At  the  same  time  the  matter 
appears  to  me  by  no  means  free  from  doubt.  I  agree  with 
Lightfoot  in  thinking  that  neither  James  nor  Jude  was  among 
the  Twelve. 

Concerning  the  date  of  the  Epistle,  our  determination  is 
materially  affected  by  the  view  we  take  of  the  persons  whose 
immorality  and  contempt  of  dignities  the  Apostle  censures.  I 
have  already  mentioned  (p.  27)  that  Renan  imagines  that 
Jude  wished  his  readers  to  understand  the  Apostle  Paul. 
Renan  can  thus  date  the  letter  as  early  as  54.  But  he 
stands  alone  in  this  fantastic  criticism.  Clement  of  Alex- 


524  THE    EPISTLE    OF   ST.   JUDE.  [XXIV. 

andria,  in  a  passage  already  cited,  supposes  that  Jude  spoke 
prophetically  of  the  immoral  teaching  of  Carpocrates ;  and 
some  modern  critics,  sharing  the  view  that  the  Epistle  is 
directed  against  this  form  of  Gnosticism,  consider  that  it  can 
not  be  earlier  than  the  second  century.  I  have  already  had 
occasion  to  mention  (p.  362)  that  on  the  doctrine  common  to 
the  Gnostic  sects,  of  the  essential  impurity  of  matter,  two 
opposite  rules  of  life  were  founded.  The  earliest  seems  to 
have  been  a  rigorously  ascetic  rule,  men  hoping  that  by  mor 
tifying  the  body  they  could  make  the  soul  more  pure  and 
more  vigorous.  But  before  long  there  were  others  who  held 
that  by  knowledge  the  soul  could  be  so  elevated  as  to  surfer 
no  detriment  from  the  deeds  of  the  body,  however  gross  they 
might  be.  Nay,  there  were  some  who,  accepting  the  doctrine 
of  the  Old  Testament,  that  the  precepts  of  the  Decalogue 
came  from  him  who  made  the  world,  but  believing  also  that 
the  creation  of  matter  had  been  a  bad  work,  inculcated  the 
violation  of  these  precepts  as  a  duty,  in  order  to  exhibit  hos 
tility  to  the  evil  Being  or  Beings  who  had  created  the  world. 
To  this  immoral  type  of  Gnosticism  the  teaching  of  Carpo 
crates  belonged  ;  but  I  see  no  warrant  for  asserting  that  any 
such  systematicjustification  of  immorality  had  been  developed 
when  our  Epistle  was  written.  I  find  nothing  in  this  Epistle 
to  prevent  our  assigning  it  to  the  Apostolic  age ;  for  other 
Apostles  had  had  cause  to  complain  of  impurity,  which  had 
already  crept  into  the  Church  (2  Cor.  xii.  21  ;  Phil.  iii.  19  ; 
Rev.  ii.  20-22).  Some  critics  (e.g.  Schenkel,  in  his  Bible 
Lexicon]  have  discovered  Gnostic  theories  in  v.  4,  inferring 
from  it  that  those  whom  Jude  opposed  did  not  believe  in  the 
unity  of  God,  and  defended  their  evil  practices  by  maintaining 
the  duty  of  antagonism  to  the  Creator.  But  I  consider  that 
Jude's  words,  '  denying  our  only  Master  and  Lord,  Jesus 
Christ,'  no  more  of  necessity  imply  doctrinal  error  than  do 
Paul's  words,  in  the  passage  of  Philippians  just  cited,  '  ene 
mies  of  the  Cross  of  Christ.'  And  those  whom  Jude  in  the 
same  verse  describes  as  '  turning  the  grace  of  our  God  into 
lasciviousness'  seem  to  me  not  different  from  those  who, 
*  having  been  called  unto  liberty,  used  liberty  for  an  occasion  to 
the  flesh'  (Gal.v.  13).  St.  Paul  in  the  beginning  of  i  Cor.  x.  had 


XXIV.]   AGAINST   WHOM    WERE   ITS   CENSURES   AIMED  ?        525 

used  the  same  example  which  St.Jude  employs  in  warning 
those  men  of  corrupt  hearts  who,  having  slipped  into  the 
Church,  presumed  on  the  grace  they  had  received.  Both 
Apostles  remind  them  of  the  fate  of  those  Israelites  of  old, 
who,  though  they  had  escaped  out  of  the  land  of  Egypt,  yet 
suffered  in  the  wilderness  the  penalty  of  their  unbelief  and 
disobedience.  And  Jude  adds  the  further  example,  that  even 
angels  fell.  On  the  whole,  I  conclude  that  the  evils  under 
which  Jude's  Epistle  reveals  the  Church  to  be  suffering  are 
not  essentially  different  from  those  the  existence  of  which 
we  learn  from  Paul's  Epistles;  and  therefore  that  we  are  not 
forced  to  bring  the  authorship  down  to  the  second  century. 
Nothing  forbids  us  to  give  it  the  date  it  must  have  had  if 
really  written  by  Jude  the  brother  of  James,  namely,  before 
the  reign  of  Domitian,  by  which  time  Hegesippus  gives  us  to 
understand  that  Jude  had  died. 

I  will  add,  that  there  does  not  seem  to  me  to  be  sufficient 
evidence  that  those  whom  Jude  condemns  were  teachers  of 
false  doctrine,  or  even  teachers  at  all.  I  think  his  language 
is  fully  satisfied  if  we  suppose  them  to  be  private  members 
of  the  Church  who  lived  ungodly  lives,  and  who  were  in 
subordinate  and  contumelious  when  rebuked  by  their  spiritual 
superiors.* 

It  remains  to  say  something  about  what  Jerome  states  to 
have  been  a  bar  to  the  reception  of  Jude's  Epistle,  namely,  its 
use  of  Jewish  apocryphal  literature.  Two  passages  in  parti 
cular  demand  attention.  In  the  first  place,  Origen  states  (De 
Princip.  \\\.  2)  that  the  mention  (v.  9)  of  the  contest  for  the 
body  of  Moses,  between  Michael  the  Archangel  and  the 
Devil,  is  derived  from  an  apocryphal  book  called  the  As- 


*  The  Revised  Version  translates  a$6&<as  eavrovs  irotnaivovTcs  (v.  12), 
«  shepherds  that  without  fear  feed  themselves,'  looking  on  the  passage  as 
containing  a  reference  to  Ezek.  xxxiv.  2,  '  Woe  be  to  the  shepherds  of  Israel 
that  do  feed  themselves.'  But  the  words  in  the  LXX.  there  are  &6<rKovffiv 
iavrovs,  and  Jude's  words  convey  to  me  a  different  idea  ;  not  that  of  self- 
seeking  clergy,  but  of  schismatical  laity  who  separate  themselves  from  the 
flock  of  Christ,  and  are  not  afraid  to  be  their  own  shepherds.  Lucifer  (De 
non  con-ven.  cum  haret.,  p.  794,  Migne)  renders  '  semetipsos  regentes.' 
Many  of  the  phrases  packed  together  in  Jude's  Epistle  might  each  be  the 
text  of  a  discourse  ;  so  that  I  could  easily  believe  that  we  had  in  this 
Epistle  heads  of  topics  enlarged  on,  either  in  a  longer  document,  or  by  the 
Apostle  himself  in  viva  voce  addresses. 


526  THE   EPISTLE   OF   ST.    JUDE.  [XXIV. 

sumption  of  Moses.  The  same  thing  is  intimated  in  a  pas 
sage  of  Didymus,  already  referred  to,  and  in  a  passage  of 
Apollinaris  of  Laodicea  preserved  in  a  catena.  This  book 
of  the  Assumption  of  Moses  appears  to  have  obtained  some 
circulation  in  the  Christian  Church.  It  is  cited  by  Clement 
of  Alexandria  (Strom,  vi.  15,  p.  806);  by  Origen  (in  Lib. 
fesu  Nav.  Horn.  ii.  i)  ;  by  Evodius,  a  correspondent  of  Augus 
tine's  (Augustine,  Epist.  158,  opp.  ii.  561);  and  by  Gelasius 
of  Cyzicus  (Ada  Syn.  NIC.  Mansi,  Condi,  ii.  844,  858).  It 
is  enumerated  among  Old  Testament  apocrypha  in  the 
synopsis  of  the  pseudo-Athanasius  ;  and  it  is  included  in  the 
stichometry  of  Nicephorus,  who  assigns  it  the  same  length 
(1400  em'xoi)  as  the  Apocalypse  of  St.  John.  Nevertheless 
it  had  almost  entirely  perished,  when,  in  1861,  a  large  frag 
ment  of  a  Latin  version  of  it  was  recovered  and  published 
by  Ceriani,  from  a  palimpsest  in  the  Ambrosian  Library  of 
Milan.  From  what  we  learn  from  Nicephorus  as  to  the  length 
of  the  original,  we  know  that  the  recovered  portion  is  not 
more  than  one-third  of  it ;  and  it  is  in  a  very  imperfect  state^ 
many  words  or  letters  being  obliterated.*  The  recovered 
fragment  has  been  edited  by  Hilgenfeld  in  his  Nov.  Test, 
extra  Canon,  recept.  ;  and  he  has  attempted  to  restore  the 
Greek  in  his  Messias  Jud&orum.  You  can  also  very  conve 
niently  find  it  in  Fritzsche's  edition  of  the  Old  Testament 
apocryphal  books.  Critics  have  drawn  from  the  fragment 
different  theories  as  to  the  date  of  the  book ;  but  it  appears 
to  me  that  the  data  are  altogether  insufficient  to  warrant  any 
certain  conclusion.  The  fragment,  unfortunately,  breaks  off 
before  the  death  of  Moses,  so  that  we  have  not  the  means  of 
verifying  that  the  work  related  a  dispute  between  the  Devil 
and  the  Archangel  Michael.  But  I  do  not  think  we  are 
warranted  in  rejecting  the  early  testimony  that  this  book 
was  the  authority  used  by  Jude,  since  what  he  refers  to  is 
certainly  not  found  in  the  canonical  Scriptures  of  the  Old 
Testament. 

*  The  recovered  fragment  wants  the  title  ;  but  the  citation  of  Gelasius* 
enables  us  to  be  certain  in  identifying  it.  The  passage  cited  describes 
Moses  as  rrjs  Siad-fjKrjs  avrov  /j.€(rir7]s,  a  phase  which  it  is  interesting  to 
compare  with  Gal.  iii.  19,  Heb.  viii.  6. 


XXIV.]  THE   BOOK   OF   ENOCH.  527 

The  second  passage  is  the  quotation  (v.  14)  of  the  words 
of  Enoch.  I  have  already  said  that  Tertullian  mentions  a 
Book  of  Enoch,  which  in  his  opinion  ought  to  be  received, 
notwithstanding  that  it  had  not  been  admitted  into  the  Canon 
of  the  Jews,  who  reject  this,  as  they  usually  do  what  speaks 
of  Christ.  Among  Christian  writers  Tertullian  stands  alone 
in  this  acceptance.  Origen  (Horn,  in  Numer.  xxviii.  2)  and 
Augustine  (De  Civ.  Dei,  xviii.  38,  a  passage  which  deserves 
to  be  consulted)  mention  without  disapproval  the  rejection  of 
it  by  the  Jews.  The  book  was  known  to  Irenseus  (iv.  xvi.  2), 
Clement  of  Alexandria  (Eclog.  ii.  p.  990),  Anatolius  (Euseb. 
vii.  32),  Origen  (De  Princip.  iv.  35,  Adv.  Cels.  v.  35):  see  also 
Constt.  Apost.  vi.  30.  Several  extracts  from  the  book  were 
preserved  by  Georgius  Syncellus,  a  monk  of  Constantinople, 
towards  the  end  of  the  eighth  century.  In  these  passages 
the  story  is  told,  founded  on  Gen.  vi.  i,  of  a  descent  of  angels 
to  this  lower  world,  where  they  became  the  parents  of  the 
giants.  The  same  story  appears  in  Justin  Martyr  (Apol. 
ii.  5),  and  in  both  forms  of  the  pseudo-Clementines,  possibly 
derived  from  this  source ;  and  it  may  also  be  referred  to  in 
Jude  6. 

Beyond  the  extracts  just  mentioned  the  book  had  been 
completely  lost,  until,  in  1773,  the  traveller  Bruce  brought 
back  from  Abyssinia  copies  of  an  Ethiopic  version  of  the 
Book  of  Enoch.  Laurence,fArchbishop  of  Cashel,  published 
an  English  translation  of  this  in  1821  (republished,  London, 
1883),  followed  by  the  Ethiopic  text  in  1838,  and  this  text  has 
been  re-edited  with  a  German  translation  by  Dillmann  in  1853. 
It  would  be  out  of  place  here  if  I  were  to  give  a  description 
of  the  book,  or  to  enter  into  discussions  concerning  its  date 
or  its  unity  of  authorship.  Suffice  it  to  say  that  there  is  no 
reason  for  doubting  that  the  book  is  quite  old  enough  to  have 
been  used  by  the  Apostle  Jude;*  and  that  it  contains,  with 
very  trifling  variations,  the  words  quoted  by  Jude.  Some 
respectable  divines  have  maintained,  notwithstanding,  that 
Jude  did  not  derive  hence  his  knowledge  of  Enoch's  prophecy, 

*  I  believe  this  to  be  the  opinion  of  all  critics  but  Volkmar,  who  assigns 
a  late  date  to  the  epistle  of  Jude,  and  with  this  object  strives  to  push 
down  both  the  Assumption  of  Moses  and  the  Book  of  Enoch  to  the  reign 
of  Hadrian. 


528  THE   EPISTLE   OF  ST.   JUDE.  [XXIV. 

but  that  it  had  been  preserved  traditionally,  and  afterwards 
incorporated  in  the  Book  of  Enoch.  And  it  has  been  sug 
gested  that  the  words  now  found  in  the  Ethiopic  version  were 
introduced  from  Jude  by  the  translator,  or  had  previously 
been  interpolated  by  a  Christian  into  the  Greek.  I  do  not 
feel  that  I  can  with  candour  take  this  line.*  We  can  feel  no 
surprise  that  an  Apostle  should  be  acquainted  with  the  Jewish 
literature  current  in  his  age ;  but  it  is,  no  doubt,  natural  to  us 
to  think  that  God  would  supernaturally  enlighten  him  so  as 
to  prevent  his  being  deceived  by  a  falsely  ascribed  book  ;  and 
that  if  he  referred  to  such  a  book  at  all  he  would  take  care  to 
make  it  plain  to  his  readers  that  he  attributed  to  it  no  autho 
rity.  Yet  we  follow  a  very  unsafe  method  if  we  begin  by 
deciding  in  what  way  it  seems  to  us  most  fitting  that  God 
should  guide  His  Church,  and  then  try  to  wrest  facts  into 
conformity  with  our  pre-conceptions.f 


*  In  the  first  place,  observe  the  close  agreement  of  the  passage  formally 
quoted  :  '  Behold  he  comes  with  ten  thousand  of  his  saints,  to  execute 
judgment  upon  them,  and  destroy  the  wicked,  and  reprove  all  the  carnal 
for  everything  which  the  sinful  and  ungodly  have  done  and  committed 
against  him '  (Enoch  ch.  2,  Laurence's  translation).  But  there  are, 
besides,  between  the  two  books,  other  coincidences  to  which  my  attention 
has  been  called  by  Mr.  Garrett.  Thus,  Jude's  *  reserved  in  everlasting 
chains  under  darkness  unto  the  judgment  of  the  great  day'  clearly  has  its 
origin  in  Enoch  x.  6-9  (see  also  v.  16),  '  Bind  Azazel  hand  and  foot,  .  .  . 
covering  him  with  darkness  ;  there  shall  he  remain  for  ever,  covering  his 
face  that  he  see  not  the  light ;  and  in  the  great  day  of  Judgment  let  him 
be  cast  into  the  fire.'  The  'wandering  stars'  of  Jude  13  maybe  com 
pared  with  what  Enoch  tells,  xviii.  15,  of  the  '  prison  of  stars ;'  and  xxi.  3, 
of  stars  which  have  transgressed  the  commandment  of  the  Most  High.' 
And  the  words  of  Enoch  xxvi.  2,3,'  Here  shall  be  collected  all  who  utter 
with  their  mouths  unbecoming  language  against  God,  and  speak  harsh 
things  of  his  glory.  In  the  latter  days  an  example  shall  be  made  of  them 
in  righteousness  before  the  saints,'  seem  to  have  suggested  the  SeTy^a  of 
Jude  7,  as  well  as  the  Kvpi6rr]Ta  adfrovffiv  5d|as  8e  0\a.<r<f>iri/j.ovffiv  of  v.  8. 
See  also  v.  16. 

f  It  has  been  already  stated  (p.  515)  that  thePeshitto  version  only  con 
tained  three  Catholic  Epistles.  The  remaining  four,  viz.  Jude,  2  Peter, 
2  and  3  John,  were  first  printed  in  Syriac,  by  Pococke,  in  1630,  from  a  six 
teenth- century  MS.  in  the  Bodleian,  and  were  afterwards  included  in  the 
Paris  Polyglo't,  followed  by  Walton's  and  by  most  subsequent  editions. 
But  the  evidence,  both  external  and  internal,  forbids  us  to  assign  to  this 
version  an  earlier  date  than  the  sixth  century.  Of  the  copies  of  these 
Epistles  in  Syriac  (a  dozen  or  more),  which  have  come  to  light  since 
Pococke' s  time,  the  oldest  is  one  of  the  Nitrian  collection  in  the  British 
Museum,  which  was  written  in  the  ninth  century.  They  are  probably 
part  of  the  translation  made  about  A.D.  508,  under  the  authority  of 
Philoxenus,  Bishop  of  Mabug,  by  Polycarpus,  a  chorepiscopus. 


(     5*9     ) 

XXV. 

THE  SECOND  EPISTLE  OF  ST.  PETER. 


WHEN  I  pointed  out,  at  the  beginning  of  the  last  lec 
ture,  that  we  had  no  right  to  be  surprised  if  it  should 
appear  that,  in  respect  of  historical  attestation,  all  the  books 
of  our  Canon  do  not  stand  on  the  same  level,  I  had  chiefly  in 
my  mind  the  book  on  the  discussion  of  which  we  are  now 
about  to  enter  —  the  Second  Epistle  of  Peter.  The  framers  of 
the  Sixth  Article  of  our  Church  use  language  which,  if  strictly 
understood,  implies  that  there  never  had  been  any  doubt  in 
the  Church  concerning  the  authority  of  any  of  the  books  of 
Old  or  New  Testament  which  they  admitted  into  their  Canon. 
Their  language  would  have  been  more  accurate  if  they  had 
said  that  they  rejected  those  books  concerning  whose  autho 
rity  there  always  had  been  doubt  in  the  Church.  They  had, 
no  doubt,  principally  in  view  the  apocryphal  books  of  the  Old 
Testament  ;  and  these  books,  not  included  in  the  Jewish 
Canon,  were  not  only  rejected  by  many  learned  men  in  the 
earliest  ages  of  the  Church,  but  the  doubts  concerning  them 
were  never  permitted  to  be  forgotten  ;  for  Jerome's  prefaces, 
which  stated  their  inferiority  of  authority,  constantly  continued 
to  circulate  side  by  side  with  the  books  themselves.  At  the 
time  when  our  Articles  were  drawn  up  there  was  no  serious 
controversy  concerning  the  books  of  the  New  Testament,  nor 
had  there  been  any  for  some  centuries  before.  But  you  will 
have  seen  that  it  would  not  be  true  to  assert  that  there  never 
had  been  controversy.  Unfavourable  opinions  with  respect 
to  2  Peter  are  expressed  by  Eusebius  and  Jerome.*  There 


OVK 

opus    8e  TTO\\O'IS  xp-fiffi/uios  (pavelffa,   /xerci  riav   &\\tav 
(Euseb.  iii.  3). 

Simon  Petrus  .  .  .  scripsit  duas  Epistolas  quae  canonicae  [Catholicae] 
nominantur  ;  quarum  secunda  a  plerisque  ejus  esse  negatur,  propter  styli 
cum  priore  dissonantiam  (Hieron.  De  Viris  Illust.  i). 

2  M 


530        THE  SECOND  EPISTLE  OF  ST.  PETER,       [XXV. 

were  four  of  the  Catholic  Epistles  which  the  early  Syrian 
Church  did  not  receive  into  its  Canon,  and  a  fifth  which  was 
not  universally  received  elsewhere.  Traces  of  this  diversity 
of  opinion  are  to  be  found  for  sometime,  and  especially  where 
Syrian  influence  prevailed.  Chrysostom,  the  great  preacher 
of  Antioch,  never  uses  any  of  the  four  Epistles  not  included 
in  the  Peshitto  ;*  and  I  believe  that  the  same  may  be  said  of 
Theodoret.  Just  towards  the  close  of  the  first  half  of  the 
sixth  century,  Junilius,  a  high  legal  official  in  the  court  of 
Justinian,  turned  into  Latin,  for  the  benefit  of  some  African 
bishops  f  who  were  his  friends,  a  tract  on  the  Scriptures  by 
Paulus,  a  distinguished  teacher  of  Nisibis,  at  that  time  a 
centre  of  Eastern  theological  education.  In  this  tract  books 
are  divided  into  three  classes,  '  perfectae,'  *  mediae,'  and 
'nullius  auctoritatis ' :  the  first  being  those  which  he  sets 
down  absolutely  as  canonical,  the  second  those  which  he 
states  '  adjungi  a  pluribus.'  In  the  first  class  he  has  fourteen 
Epistles  of  St.  Paul  (the  Hebrews  being  last  mentioned), 
1  beati  Petri  ad  gentes  prima,  et  beati  Johannis  prima.' 
Then  in  the  second  class,  '  adjungunt  quam  plurimi  quinque 
alias,  id  est  Jacobi,  secundam  Petri,'  &c.  Kihn  shows  that 
the  exclusion  of  James,  as  well  as  of  the  other  four,  was 
derived  from  Theodore  of  Mopsuestia.  Junilius  himself 
(ii.  17)  quotes  2  Pet.  ii.  4  as  the  words  of  blessed  Peter 
without  any  sign  of  doubt.  The  tract  of  Junilius  became 
speedily  known  to  Cassiodorus,  and  thenceforward  had  con 
siderable  circulation  in  the  West.  So  late  as  the  beginning 
of  the  fourteenth  century,  Ebed  Jesu,  a  Nestorian  metropoli 
tan  of  Nisibis,  has  only  three  Catholic  Epistles  in  his  New 
Testament  Canon  (Assemani,  Bill.  Orient,  in.  9). 

*  The  solitary  instance  adduced  to  prove  his  acquaintance  with  2  Pet. 
ii.  22,  eot/cei/  rip  KVV\  Trpbs  rbv  tfiiov  e/ui.€TOif  eiraviovTi  (in  Joann.  Horn. 
xxxiv.  3),  is  really  derived  from  Prov.  xxvi.  n,  the  word  in  2  Peter  being 
e|6po/io,  not  €{J.€TOV.  The  same  proverb,  also  with  e^ue-rov,  is  the  only 
apparent  sign  of  acquaintance  with  the  four  Epistles  I  find  in  the  index  to 
Theodoret  (In  Dan.  iii.  i).  But  Chrysostom's  friend,  Basil,  uses  2  Peter 
(adv.  Eunom.  v.  i) ;  and  we  are  bound  to  remember  that  the  absence  of 
quotations  may  be  explained  by  the  fact  that,  of  the  four  Epistles  in  ques 
tion,  three  are  extremely  short,  and  the  fourth  not  very  long. 

t  Consequently,  Junilius  has  commonly  passed  for  an  African  bishop 
himself,  until  his  true  history  was  tracked  out  by  Kihn  (Theodor  von 
Mopsuestia^  1880). 


XXV.]         ONE  OF  THE  '  ANTILEGOMENA.'  531 

Notwithstanding  isolated  expressions  of  dissent,  the  gene 
ral  voice  of  the  Church  accepted  all  seven  Catholic  Epistles  ; 
and  this  verdict  remained  undisturbed  until  the  revival  of 
learning.  Then  Erasmus  on  the  one  hand,  Calvin  on  the 
other,  express  doubts  as  to  2  Peter.  The  latter,  in  the 
preface  to  his  Commentary,  shows  himself  much  impressed 
by  what  Jerome  had  remarked  as  to  difference  of  style  from 
that  of  the  First  Epistle,  as  well  as  by  other  considerations 
leading  him  to  think  Peter  not  the  author.  But  he  says  that, 
if  the  Epistle  is  canonical  at  all,  Petrine  authorship  in  some 
sense  must  be  acknowledged,  since  the  Epistle  plainly  claims 
it.  And  '  since  the  majesty  of  the  Spirit  of  Christ  exhibits 
itself  in  every  part  of  the  Epistle,'  he  scruples  to  reject  it, 
though  not  recognizing  in  it  the  genuine  language  of  Peter. 
He  is  therefore  disposed  to  believe  that  it  may  have  been 
written,  at  Peter's  command,  by  one  of  his  disciples.  And 
this  is  almost  precisely  the  line  taken  by  Erasmus.  Later 
critics  have  taken  even  a  more  unfavourable  view  of  the 
Epistle ;  and  at  the  present  day  it  is  generally  rejected  even 
by  the  less  extreme  critics  of  the  sceptical  school,  while  its 
cause  has  been  abandoned  by  some  within  our  own  Church. 

I  am  not  prepared  to  condemn  those  who  do  not  pretend 
to  have  a  stronger  assurance  of  the  genuineness  of  the  book 
than  had  Eusebius  and  Jerome ;  but  I  may  point  out  that  its 
authority  can  well  stand  notwithstanding  the  fact  that  these 
eminent  critics  entertained  doubts  of  it.  We  have  just  seen 
that  to  have  been  subject  to  early  doubts  is  a  lot  which 
2  Peter  shares  in  common  with  four  other  of  the  Catholic 
Epistles ;  and  yet,  as  respects  them,  we  have  found  reason  to 
think,  not  that  the  case  for  these  Epistles  was  bad,  but  that 
the  scrutiny  to  which  they  were  subjected  was  very  severe. 
With  respect  to  early  attestation,  the  case  for  the  Epistle  of 
James  is  little  stronger  than  that  for  2  Peter,  yet  I  count  that 
its  authority  cannot  be  reasonably  impugned.  I  feel  no  doubt 
that  the  two  minor  Epistles  of  St.  John  come  from  the  same 
hand  as  the  First ;  though  if  we  referred  the  matter  to  the 
judgment  of  early  critics  the  decision  might  turn  out  the 
other  way.  The  evidence  of  early  recognition  of  Peter's 
Second  Epistle  is  certainly  weaker  than  in  the  case  of  most 

2  M  2 


532        THE  SECOND  EPISTLE  OF  ST.  PETER.       [XXV. 

other  New  Testament  books.  Yet  it  is  by  no  means  incon 
siderable  ;  and  at  the  beginning  of  this  course  of  lectures  I 
remarked  how  many  classical  books  there  are  as  to  the 
genuineness  of  which  we  feel  no  doubt,  notwithstanding  the 
impossibility  of  giving  proof  of  early  recognition. 

By  the  fifth  century  the  authority  of  the  seven  Catholic 
Epistles,  including  2  Peter,  was  acknowledged  throughout 
the  greater  part  of  the  Christian  world ;  and  I  believe  this  to 
be  true  of  the  fourth  century  also  ;  for  I  think  that  Eusebius 
and  Jerome  only  express  the  closet  doubts  of  learned  men, 
and  not  popular  Church  opinion.  In  Jerome's  case,  what  we 
know  of  his  method  of  composition  gives  us  reason  to  believe 
that  he  is  rather  repeating  what  he  had  read  than  stating  the 
belief  of  his  own  time,  or  even  his  own  deliberate  opinion. 
For  he  elsewhere  speaks  of  the  Epistle  without  any  doubt  of 
its  authorship  (Ep.  53,  ad  Paul  in.  de  stud,  script.}'*  and  he 
offers  the  suggestion  that  the  difference  of  style  between  the 
two  Epistles  might  be  accounted  for  by  Peter's  having  used 
different  interpreters!  (Epist.  120,  ad  Hedibiam,  Quasi,  xi.). 
Jerome's  friend  Epiphanius  uses  the  Epistle  without  doubt  J 
(Haer.  Ixvi.  65).  Didymus,  the  blind  head  of  the  catechetical 
school  of  Alexandria,  has  left  a  Commentary  on  the  Catholic 
Epistles,  preserved  in  Latin  by  Cassiodorus,  all  through  which 
2  Peter  appears  to  be  treated  as  possessing  full  canonical 
authority,  until  in  the  very  last  sentence  we  are  surprised 
to  read,  'Non  est  igitur  ignorandum  praesentem  epistolam 
esse  falsatam,  quae  licet  publicetur,  non  tamen  in  canone  est/ 
Some  doubt  is  cast  on  this  clause  by  the  fact  that  in  the  work 
De  Trinitate,  which  appears  to  be  rightly  ascribed  to  Didymus, 
he  ten  times  quotes  our  Epistle  as  Peter's,  without  note  of 
doubt  (see  I.  xv.  p.  303,  Migne,  and  the  passages  referred  to 

*  The  prologue  to  the  Catholic  Epistles,  printed  as  Jerome's,  is  not 
genuine. 

t  It  is  natural  to  set  down  Mark  as  one  of  them,  and  it  has  been  con 
jectured  that  Glaucias  may  have  been  the  other ;  but  this  suggestion  is 
derived  from  an  authority  not  entitled  to  much  respect,  namely,  the  heretic 
Basilides,  who  claimed  to  have  received  traditions  from  an  interpreter  of 
Peter  so  called  (Clem.  Alex.  Strom,  vii.  17). 

J  Quoting  it  with  the  formula  rieVpos  kv  rfj  eTno-ToAf?,  which,  when  used 
by  earlier  writers  in  a  citation  from  the  First  Epistle^  is  commonly  taken 
for  an  implied  rejection  of  the  Second. 


XXV.]  EXTERNAL   EVIDENCE.  533 

in  Mingarelli's  note).  But  the  clause  has  all  the  marks  of 
being  a  translation  from  the  Greek.  '  Non  est  ignorandum 
epistolam  esse  falsatam,'  probably  represents,  ia-reov  ws  voOevc- 
rai  TJ  €7TLo-ToXrj  (see  Eus.  ii.  23),  and  merely  means  that  the 
genuineness  of  the  Epistle  was  disputed. 

That  the  opinion  of  Eusebius  was  unfavourable  cannot  be 
denied ;  but  I  believe  that  he,  too,  is  but  echoing  the  doubts 
of  predecessors.  We  have  every  reason  to  think  that  in  his 
own  time  the  current  of  opinion  ran  strongly  in  favour  of  the 
Epistle.  On  the  establishment  of  Christianity  by  Constantine, 
an  active  multiplication  of  copies  of  the  Scriptures  became 
necessary,  both  in  order  to  repair  the  losses  suffered  under 
the  Diocletian  persecution,  and  to  provide  for  the  wants  of 
the  many  new  converts.  And  all  the  evidence  we  can  draw, 
whether  from  existing  MSS.,*  or  from  ancient  catalogues  of 
the  books  of  Scripture,  goes  to  make  it  probable  that  wher 
ever  the  production  of  a  complete  Bible  was  intended,  it 
included  the  collection  of  seven  Catholic  Epistles,  the  exist 
ence  of  which  Eusebius  himself  recognizes.  These  seven 
were  owned  as  canonical  by  Athanasius  and  by  Cyril  of 
Jerusalem,  both  younger  contemporaries  of  Eusebius. 

Among  the  predecessors  whose  opinion  had  most  weight 
with  Eusebius  was  Origen,  who  (in  a  passage  cited  p.  290) 
attests  both  that  the  book  was  known  in  his  time,  and  that 
its  genuineness  was  disputed.  I  have  remarked  that  Origen's 
immediate  purpose  in  that  passage  would  lead  him  to  present 
the  least  favourable  view  of  the  genuineness  of  disputed  books. 
In  several  places  elsewhere  Origen  quotes  2  Peter  without 
expression  of  doubt.  It  is  true  these  quotations  are  all  found 
in  works  only  known  to  us  through  the  Latin  translation  of 
Rufinus,  whose  faithfulness  cannot  be  depended  on ;  but,  on 
examination  of  the  passages,  it  does  not  seem  to  me  likely 

*  The  two  earliest  existing  MSS.,  which  probably  are  as  early  as  the 
reign  of  Constantine,  both  include  the  seven  Catholic  Epistles.  So  does 
the  Claromontane  list,  the  original  of  which  Westcott  believes  to  be  as  old 
as  the  third  century.  In  Codex  B  (where,  as  is  customary,  the  Catholic 
Epistles  follow  the  Acts)  there  is  a  twofold  division  of  sections,  an  older 
and  a  later.  In  2  Peter  alone  the  older  division  of  sections  is  wanting  ; 
from  which  it  may  be  inferred  that  this  Epistle  was  wanting  in  an  ancestor 
of  the  Vatican  MS. 


534  THE    SECOND    EPISTLE    OF    ST.    PETER.  [XXV. 

that  Rufinus  could  have  invented  them;  and  I  believe  the 
truth  to  be,  that  Origen  in  popular  addresses  did  not  think  it 
necessary  to  speak  with  scientific  accuracy.  It  is  implied  in 
this  solution  that  Peter's  authorship  was  the  popular  belief  of 
Origen's  time  ;  and  this  is  made  probable  to  me  by  the  fact 
that  Origen's  contemporary,  Firmilian  of  Cappadocia,  writing 
to  Cyprian  (Cyprian,  Ep.  75),  speaks  of  Peter  as  having 
execrated  heretics,  and  warned  us  to  avoid  them,  words 
which  can  only  refer  to  the  Second  Epistle.  We  can  produce 
no  evidence  of  knowledge  of  the  Epistle  from  the  writings  of 
Cyprian  himself,  nor  from  those  of  his  predecessor  Tertullian. 
I  have  mentioned  (p.  478)  that  the  Muratorian  Fragment  does 
not  notice  the  Second  Epistle,  but  that  its  equal  silence  con 
cerning  the  First  makes  us  unable  to  build  an  argument  on 
this  omission.  But  that  2  Peter  did  not  form  part  of  the 
earliest  Canon  of  the  Latin  Church  appears  probable  from 
the  fact  that  it  was  not  translated  by  the  same  hand  as  other 
of  the  Catholic  Epistles.  The  same  Greek  words  in  i  Peter 
and  2  Peter  are  rendered  differently ;  as  also  the  same  words 
in  the  parallel  places  of  2  Peter  and  Jude.* 

I  must  leave  it  undetermined  whether  or  not  Clement  of 
Alexandria  used  the  Epistle.  When  we  have  the  testimony 
of  Eusebius  and  of  Photius  (see  p.  493)  that  Clement  wrote 
comments  on  the  Catholic  Epistles,  we  seem  to  have  no  war 
rant  for  treating  this  as  a  loose  way  of  stating  that  he  com 
mented  only  on  some  of  them.  Accordingly,  Hilgenfeld  and 
Davidson,  although  they  both  reject  2  Peter,  yet  believe  that 
Clement  commented  on  it ;  and  Davidson  suggests  that  Cas- 
siodorus  may  have  only  been  in  possession  of  extracts  from 
Clement's  Hypotyposeis .  But  since  I  find  in  Clement's  other 
writings  no  proofs  of  acquaintance  with  the  two  Epistles 
which  Cassiodorus  leaves  out,  I  do  not  venture  to  assert 
positively  that  Clement's  comments  included  these  two 
Epistles. 

Irenseus  makes  no  express  mention  of  2   Peter,    and  he 

*  The  evidence  will  be  found  in  Westcott  (N.  T.  Canon,  p.  261).  We 
have  no  Latin  MSS.  containing  a  pre-Hieronymian  text  of  2  Peter;  nor 
indeed  of  any  of  the  Catholic  Epistles  except  James,  and  a  small  fragment 
of  3  John.  The  remark  above  applies  to  the  Vulgate,  the  text  of  which  no 
doubt  represents  an  earlier  translation  merely  revised  by  Jerome. 


XXV.]  EXTERNAL   EVIDENCE.  535 

seems  to  exclude  it  by  the  phrase  '  in  epistola  sua*  (iv.  ix.  2), 
when  he  speaks  of  the  First  Epistle  ;  but  he  has  one  or  two 
coincidences  with  the  Second,  which  require  examination. 
And  first  we  have  twice  '  The  day  of  the  Lord  is  as  it  were  a 
thousand   years'    (v.   xxiii.   2,   and  xxviii.  3),  words  which 
recall  2  Peter  iii.  8.     But  whatever  may  have  been  the  ulti 
mate  source  of  this  saying,  it  seems  to  me  that  in  neither  case 
vas  Peter  the  immediate  source  from  which  Irenaeus  took  it. 
In  the  first  passage  Irenaeus  reproduces  an  explanation  by 
which  Justin  Martyr  (Trypho,  81)  reconciles  the  long  life  of 
Adam  with  the  threat,   *  In  the  day  that  thou  eatest  thereof, 
thou  shalt  surely  die.'     The  words  in  Irenaeus  are  exactly  the 
same  as  in  Justin,  ^jttepa  Kvpt'ou  ws  -^1X10.  ery;,  not  as  in  Peter, 
fu'a  fyiepa  Trapa  Kvptu  ws  ^.  e. ;  and  the  use  Irenaeus  makes  of 
the  vtords  being  the  same  as  in  Justin,  and  not  as  in  Peter, 
the  former  is  clearly  the  immediate  source  of  the  quotation. 
In  the  second  passage  Irenaeus  expounds  the  statement  in 
Genesis  that  God  completed  His  works  in  six  days,  as  not 
merely  a  history  of  the  past,  but  a  prophecy  of  the  future, 
intimating  that  the  world  was  to  last  6000  years,  the  day  of 
the  Lord  being  as    1000  years.     The   maxim  is  quoted  in 
Justin's  form,  but  the  exposition  had  already  been  given  by 
Barnabas  (c.  15);  and  on  comparing  the  passages  it  seems  to 
me  probable  that  it  was  to  Barnabas  Irenaeus  was  indebted 
for  it.     But   though   this   maxim    decides    nothing    as    to 
Irenasus's  knowledge  of  2  Peter,  it  would  be  still  more  to 
the  point  if  it  showed  that  two  earlier  writers  were  acquainted 
with  the  Epistle.     There  is  nothing  to  show  whence  Justin 
derived  what  he  calls  TO  dprj/jievov  ;*  but  Barnabas  enunciates 
the  principle,  '  a  day  with  him  is  a  thousand  years,'  not  as  a 
quotation,  but  as  a  maxim  of  his  own.     And  in  proof  of  it  he 
adduces  avros  Se  /XO6  yaaprvpet  Aeyan/'  'iSov  crrj/jiepoi'  fjfjiepa  Icrrai 
w5  x-  *•     This  is  clearly  meant  for  a  quotation  of  Ps.  xc.  4  ;  so 
that  I  fail  to  find  evidence  here  of  the  antiquity  of  2  Peter.f 

*  In  favour  of  the  Petrine  origin  may  be  noticed  that  in  the  next  chapter 
Justin  has  words  which  recall  2  Peter  ii.  I,  ftvirfp  8e  rp6irov  Kal  \l*fv8oTrpo~ 
<£>7jTcu  CTT!  TWf  Trap'  V/JLIV  yevo/j.evwv  ayi<av  irpo^rcov  i)ffavt  Kal  Trap1  r]fuu  vvv 
iro\\oi  flfft  Kal  xJ/eu8o5i8acr/caA.oi. 

•f  It  must  be  borne  in  mind  that  Rabbinical  writers  (see  Schottgen,  Horce 
Heb.  et  Talmud.  I.  1052,  ii.  497)  have  both  the  interpretations  used  by 


THE   SECOND   EPISTLE    OF   ST   PETER.  [XXV. 

The  warnings  drawn  in  succession  from  the  history  of  Noah, 
and  from  that  of  Lot  in  Iren.  iv.  xxxvi.  3,  have  been  thought  to 
be  an  echo  of  2  Peter  ii.  5-8  ;  but  it  seems  to  me  that  Irenaeus 
does  no  more  than  comment  on  Luke  xvii.  26-3 1 .  I  am  much 
more  struck  by  the  coincidence  that  in  speaking  of  the  death 
of  Peter  (iii.  i),  Irenseus  uses  the  word  e£oSos  employed  by 
Peter  himself  (2  Peter  i.  15).  Some  carry  the  argument  fur 
ther,  and  contend  that  the  author  of  2  Peter  is  proved  to  be 
the  Apostle,  because,  when  speaking  of  the  Transfiguratioa, 
he  uses  the  word  'tabernacle'  in  immediate  connexion  wrth 
c£oSos,  which  is  found  in  the  same  context  (Luke  ix.  31,  33). 
In  this  latter  part  of  the  argument  I  see  no  force,  for  it  might 
as  well  be  adduced  to  prove  that  the  author  of  2  Peter  derived 
his  knowledge  of  the  Transfiguration  from  having  read  the 
Gospel  of  St.  Luke.  It  is  not  certain  whether  in  the  passage 
of  Irenseus  we  are  to  render  c£oSos  'decease'  or  'departure' 
[from  Rome]  ;  but  undoubtedly  the  word  e£oSos  came  very 
early  into  the  Christian  vocabulary,  expressing  as  it  dees  the 
doctrine  that  death  is  no  more  than  removal  to  another  scene. 
We  have,  for  instance,  TO,  /xaprvpta  r^s  e£o8ov  O.VT&V  in  che  his 
tory  of  the  martyrdoms  at  Vienne  and  Lyons  (Euseb.v.  i); 
and  further  on  dyaAAia)/Aei/?7  ITT!  rf)  e£o8w  and  eTucr^payicra/tevos 
avTcov  Sia  T??S  e£oSov  rty  /xaprvptav.  The  word  e£oSos  occurs  in 
the  same  sense  in  one  of  the  best  known  passages  of  the  Book 
of  Wisdom  (iii.  2) ;  it  is  used  in  the  same  way  both  by  Philo 
and  Josephus,  and  you  will  find  in  Wetstein's  notes  on  Luke 
ix.  31  a  host  of  illustrations  of  the  use  of  the  word  '  exitus' 
for  death,  by  Latin  heathen  writers.  I  feel,  therefore,  that  it 
is  precarious  to  build  any  argument  on  the  use  of  so  common 
a  word  ;  and,  consequently,  I  cannot  rely  on  any  of  the  proofs 
that  have  been  supposed  to  show  Irenseus's  acquaintance  with 
our  Epistle. 

On  the  other  hand,  there  is  a  passage  in  the  Clementine 
Recognitions  (v.  12)  which  I  have  not  seen  noticed.  We  have 
only  the  Latin  of  the  Recognitions  ;  but  '  unusquisque  illius 

Barnabas  and  by  Justin.  We  have,  therefore,  to  choose  whether  we  shall 
hold  that  the  Jews  derived  these  from  the  Christian  Church,  or  shall  admit 
that  Barnabas  may  have  derived  his  principle  from  a  source  different  from 
2  Peter. 


XXV.]  EXTERNAL   EVIDENCE.  537 

fit  servus  cui  se  ipse  subjecerit'  looks  very  like  the  translation 
of  u>  TIS  ^TT^rai,  TOUTO)  Kal  8e<WAwTai  (2  Peter  ii.  19).*  Rufinus 
is  the  translator,  and  in  one  of  his  translations  from  Origen 
(In  Exod.  Horn.  12)  we  have  '  unusquisque  a  quo  vincitur, 
huic  et  servus  addicitur.'  The  difference  of  the  Latin  makes 
it  likely  that  in  both  cases  Rufinus  is  translating,  not  inter 
polating.!  Theophilus  of  Antioch,  who  died  a  little  after  1 80, 
has  a  coincidence  (ad  AutoL  ii.  13)  with  Peter's  '  light  shining 
in  a  dark  place'  (i.  19).  The  words  in  Theophilus  are,  oAoyos 
avrov  <f)aivu>v  ojo-Trep  Xv^yos  eV  OIKT^UCITI  cri;ve^o/x,eVa) ;  while  Peter 
describes  the  '  prophetic  word '  as  Av'^vos  <£aiWv  eV  av^rypw 
TOTTO)  ;  and  these  words  in  Peter  may  have  been  suggested  by 
2  Esdras  xii.  42,  '  sicut  lucerna  in  loco  obscuro,'  unless  the 
obligation  is  the  other  way.  This  passage  by  itself  would 
yield  but  doubtful  evidence ;  but  I  am  led  to  believe  that  it 
indicates  a  use  of  Peter  by  Theophilus,  because  close  at  hand 
there  is  another  coincidence,  ot  Se  TOV  ®eo£)  avOpwoi  Trvev/za- 
ro<£opoi  Tri/ev/xaros  ayiov  KOL  7rpo<}>f]Tai  ye^oyaevoi  (ad  Autol.  ii.  9)  ; 
VTTO  Trveu/xaros  ayiov  c^epo/xevoc  eXaX^crav  avro  ©eov  av&panroL 
(2  Peter  i.  21).  There  also  is  a  parallel  to  this  last  verse  in 
Hippolytus  (De  Antechrislo,  2),  but  the  resemblance  is  not 
close  enough  to  be  decisive. 

Before  the  end  of  the  second  century  the  doctrine  of  the 
future  destruction  of  the  world  by  fire  had  become  an  estab 
lished  and  notorious  point  of  Christian  belief.  The  heathen 
disputant  in  Minucius  Felix  (c.  10)  says  of  the  Christians: 
*  toto  orbi  et  ipsi  mundo  cum  sideribus  suis  minantur  incen- 
dium.'  Tatian  (Or.  ad  Gr.  25),  deriving  his  doctrine  from 
Justin  (Apol.  ii.  7),  contrasts  his  Christian  belief  with  that 
of  the  Stoics ;  he  holding,  in  opposition  to  them,  that  the 
world  was  to  be  dissolved,  and  the  e/cTru'poxris  to  take  place 
— not  Kara  Katpovs,  but  €i<ra7ra£.  It  is  interesting  to  inquire 
whence,  except  from  2  Peter  iii.  10-12,  the  Christians  learned 
the  doctrine.  It  is,  indeed,  found  in  the  Sibylline  Oracles 


*  The  words  are  much  nearer  to  Peter  than  either  to  John  viii.  34,  or 
Rom.  vi.  16. 

t  Dr.  Quarry  has  pointed  out  to  me  that  in  the  Clementine  Homilies 
(xix.  20)  Tovvavriov  /j.a.Kpodv/j.e'i,  els  ^Tavoiav  /caAe?  taken  in  connexion  with 
the  whole  context,  there  is  very  probably  a  use  of  2  Peter  iii.  9. 


538  THE   SECOND   EPISTLE   OF   ST.    PETER.  [XXV. 

(iii.  83-87  ;  see  also  ii.  196,  vi.  118) ;  but  it  was  not  a  general 
article  of  Jewish  belief;  for  Philo,  in  his  treatise  *  Delncorrup- 
tibilitate  Mundi]  argues  strongly  against  the  notion,  not  as  a 
Jewish,  but  as  a  Stoic  one,  that  one  element  could  swallow 
up  the  other  three.  Many  parts  of  the  Canonical  Scriptures 
speak  of  fire  as  the  future  punishment  of  the  wicked ;  but  I 
do  not  remember  any  other  place  where  it  is  said  that  the 
whole  world  itself  shall  be  burned  up.  Now,  Dr.  Gwynn  has 
pointed  out  what  I  believe  to  be  a  real  use  of  2  Peter  in 
2  Clement  16:  cp^erat  rjSrj  fj  rjjjiepa  rfjs  Kptcretos  cos  /cAt/Javos  KO.LO- 
/xevos,  Kat  TaK^croj/rat  rives  TOJV  ovpavcov,  KOL  Tracra  fj  yrj  cos  /xoXt/3os 

CTTt  TTVpl  TYjKOfAtVOS,   KOL  TOT6  <£(XV^<TeTai  TO,  KpV<f>L(l  KCtl  <fraV€pa  epyo, 

TCOV  di/0pco7r<oi/.  The  Old  Testament  passages  here  employed 
(Mai.  iv.  i,  Is.  xxxiv.  4)  would  not  suggest  a  burning  up  of  the 
world  to  one  not  familiar  with  the  doctrine  before.  But  it  is 
the  last  clause  which  seems  to  establish  a  use  of  2  Peter. 
There,  after  phrases  nearly  identical  with  rrvpl  r^Ko/xevos,  we 
have,  according  to  the  best  attested  reading,  yfj  KOL  ev  avrrj 
epyo,  cvpe^crerat.  The  last  word  has  puzzled  interpreters  and 
transcribers;  but  it  seems  to  me  probable  that  2  Clement  so 
read  2  Peter,  and  that  he  explains  the  clause  by  Tore  </>av7ytrcTat 
TCI  epya  TWV  dv^pcoTrcoi/. 

There  are  phrases  both  in  Clement  of  Rome  and  in  Hermas 
which  recall  2  Peter  (for  instance,  /xcyaXoTrpeTr^s  8o£a,  2  Pet. 
i.  17,  Clem,  ix.) ;  but  in  neither  case  can  we  be  sure  that  the 
coincidence  is  more  than  accidental.  On  a  review  of  the 
whole  external  evidence  we  find  clear  proof  that  2  Peter  was 
in  use  early  in  the  third  century.  With  regard  to  second 
century  testimony,  the  maintainers  and  the  opponents  of  the 
genuineness  of  the  Epistle  make  it  a  drawn  battle.  There  is 
no  case  of  quotation  so  certain  as  to  constrain  the  acknow 
ledgment  of  an  opponent ;  but  there  are  probable  instances 
of  the  use  of  the  Epistle  in  sufficient  numbers  to  invalidate 
any  argument  against  the  Epistle  drawn  from  the  silence  of 
early  writers.  But  on  comparing  the  evidence  for  the  First 
and  Second  Epistles  we  have  to  own,  however  we  are  to 
account  for  it,  that  for  a  considerable  time  the  latter  had  a 
much  narrower  circulation  than  the  former,  and  was  much 
slower  in  obtaining  general  recognition. 


XXV.]  THE   AUTHOR    CLAIMS   TO    BE    PETER.  539 

Grotius  suggested  as  an  explanation  of  this  difference  that 
our  Epistle  was  written,  not  by  Peter  the  Apostle,  but  by 
Symeon,  who  succeeded  James  as  Bishop  of  Jerusalem.  It  is 
to  be  remarked  that,  whereas  the  First  Epistle  begins  '  Peter/ 
the  Second  begins  '  Symeon  [or  Simon]  Peter.'  This  has 
been  made  an  argument  against  the  genuineness  of  the 
Epistle  ;  but  the  opposite  inference  is  more  natural.  For  the 
writer  of  the  Second  Epistle  knew  of  the  First  (iii.  i)  ;  and  if 
he  were  a  forger,  it  is  surprising  that  he  should  not  conform 
to  the  model  he  had  in  his  hands  ;  and  when  professing  to 
write  to  the  same  people,  should  neither  copy  the  address 
of  the  former  Epistle,  nor  even  write  the  Apostle's  name  the 
same  way.  This  point  deserves  to  be  borne  in  mind  when 
coincidences  between  the  two  Epistles  are  explained  as 
arising  from  designed  imitation  on  the  part  of  the  writer  of 
the  Second.  For  if  this  writer  were  a  forger,  he  was  certainly 
a  very  careless  one,  who  took  little  pains  to  give  probability 
to  his  work  by  imitation  of  the  genuine  work  in  his  posses 
sion.  But,  to  return  to  the  conjecture  of  Grotius.  This 
cannot  be  upheld,  unless  we  combine  it  with  arbitrary  and 
unwarrantable  changes  in  the  text  of  the  document  we  are 
considering.  For  nothing  can  be  plainer  than  that  the  docu 
ment,  as  it  stands,  professes  to  come  from  Peter  the  Apostle. 
Not  merely  does  the  author  call  himself  Peter  in  his  saluta 
tion  :  he  professes  to  have  been  a  witness  to  the  Transfigura 
tion  (i.  1 8);  he  claims  to  be  the  author  of  the  First  Epistle 
(iii.  i) ;  he  sets  himself  on  a  level  with  Paul  (iii.  15) ;  and  he 
refers  (i.  14)  to  his  death  as  foretold  by  our  Lord,  this  being 
probably  an  allusion  to  His  words  recorded  John  xxi.  18. 

It  has  been  made  an  objection  to  the  genuineness  of  the 
Epistle,  that  the  writer  should  betray  such  anxiety  to  identify 
himself  with  the  Apostle.  On  the  other  hand,  it  has  been 
replied  with  perfect  truth,  that  this  Epistle  puts  nothing  into 
the  mouth  of  Peter  which  the  Apostle  might  not  naturally 
have  said  in  a  real  letter.  I  am  disposed  to  attribute  this 
much  weight  to  the  objection  that,  though  it  yields  no  argu 
ment  against  the  genuineness,  it  deprives  us  of  an  argument 
for  it.  In  the  case  of  most  New  Testament  books,  when  we 
test  by  internal  evidence  the  traditional  account  of  their 


540         THE  SECOND  EPISTLE  OF  ST.  PETER.       [XXV. 

authorship,  we  find  reason  to  conclude  that  the  documents 
are  both  like  what  might  have  been  written  by  the  reputed 
authors,  and  very  unlike  the  work  of  a  forger.  In  the  present 
case  we  must  own  that  a  forger,  no  doubt,  would  be  likely  to 
take  pains  to  make  the  Petrine  authorship  plain  ;  but  it  would 
be  absurd  to  deny  that  Peter  himself  might  also  leave  on  his 
work  plain  traces  of  his  authorship.  As  for  the  reference  to 
Paul ;  since  we  have  seen  that  Peter  in  his  First  Epistle  makes 
silent  use  of  Pauline  letters,  there  is  nothing  strange  in  his 
mentioning  them  by  name  in  the  Second. 

It  will  seem  to  many  that  at  the  point  at  which  we  have 
now  arrived  our  inquiry  might  well  close.  For  if  we  proceed 
we  are  brought  to  a  very  painful  alternative.  In  the  case  of 
the  Epistle  to  the  Hebrews,  we  can  treat  its  authorship  as  an 
open  question,  notwithstanding  that  it  has  so  long  passed  in 
the  Church  as  Paul's,  and  that  the  Liturgy  of  our  own  Church 
recognizes  the  claim.  For  that  Epistle  itself  does  not  profess 
to  be  Paul's,  so  that  we  can  believe  those  to  be  mistaken  who 
took  the  work  for  his,  and  yet  impute  no  dishonesty  to  the 
author.  But  here  we  have  only  the  choice  to  regard  the 
Epistle  as  the  work  of  Peter,  or  else  as  the  production  of  a 
forger,  who  hoped  to  gain  credit  for  his  work  by  dishonestly 
affixing  to  it  the  Apostle's  name.  Some  who  impugn  the 
Petrine  authorship  desire  to  let  us  down  gently,  and  deprecate 
the  employment  of  the  word  '  forger/  overtaxing  the  resources 
of  the  English  language  to  find  some  name,  '  pseudepigra- 
pher,'  or  '  falsarius,'  which  shall  sound  less  harshly.  But  I 
must  call  a  spade  a  spade.  Macaulay  is  not  to  be  called  a 
forger,  though  he  gives  the  title  '  The  prophecy  of  Capys '  to 
a  prediction  which  Capys  never  delivered.  But  where  there 
is  intention  to  deceive,  forgery  is  the  proper  word.  I  do  not 
deny  that  a  fault  may  be  less  deserving  of  censure  if  com 
mitted  by  one  of  lower  moral  culture.  The  man  who  thinks  a 
pious  fraud  permissible  may  deserve  to  be  beaten  with  fewer 
stripes  than  he  who  acts  against  his  conscience  in  committing 
it.  Whoever  the  author  of  this  Epistle  was,  he  was  clearly  a 
pious  and  orthodox  man  ;  and  if  he  was  a  forger,  we  can  dis 
cern  no  motive  for  the  forgery  but  that  of  supporting  the 
disciples  under  the  trial  to  their  faith  caused  by  the  delay  of 


XXV.]         THE    LONG  ACCEPTANCE   OF   THE    EPISTLE.  541 

their  Master's  promised  coming.  In  the  case  supposed,  there 
fore,  we  can  judge  with  all  leniency  of  the  author  ;  but  I  am 
sure  he  would  have  been  much  ashamed  if  he  had  been  found 
out  at  the  time,  and  would  have  fared  no  better  than  the 
presbyter  who  was  deposed  for  forging  the  Acts  of  Paul  and 
Thecla  (see  p.  357).  The  use  of  gentle  language,  then,  will 
do  little  to  mitigate  the  pain  we  must  feel,  if  what  we  have 
been  accustomed  to  regard  as  the  utterances  of  an  inspired 
Apostle  should  turn  out  to  be  the  work  of  one  for  whom  our 
merciful  consideration  must  be  implored,  on  account  of  his 
imperfect  knowledge  of  the  Christian  duty  of  absolute  truth 
fulness. 

To  many  the  question  will  seem  to  be  settled  by  a  reductio 
ad  absurdum,  when  it  has  been  pointed  out  that  the  rejection 
of  the  Petrine  authorship  obliges  us  to  believe  that  the  Church 
has  been  for  centuries  deceived  by  a  false  pretence  to  inspira 
tion.  But  as  I  have  undertaken  to  make  a  historical  investi 
gation,  in  the  same  manner  as  if  we  were  making  a  critical 
inquiry  into  the  authorship  of  any  classical  writings,  my  plan 
precludes  me  from  assuming  that  the  Church  could  make  no 
mistake  in  such  a  matter.  And  indeed  it  would  evidently 
require  longer  discussions  than  can  be  here  entered  into 
before  we  could  establish  the  principle  proposed  to  be 
assumed  or  ascertain  its  necessary  limitations.  Anyone  who 
uses  the  Revised  New  Testament  must  reject  a  good  deal  of 
what  has  been  long  accepted  as  inspired.  To  many  pious 
men  of  old  it  seemed  a  shocking  thing  when  the  divine  inspi 
ration  was  denied  of  the  Greek  Old  Testament,  which  the 
Apostles  had  committed  to  the  Church.  We  do  not  receive 
the  decisions  on  the  Canon  made  at  Carthage  or  at  Trent,  not 
believing  that  the  opinions  as  to  the  authority  of  Greek  and 
Hebrew  books,  expressed  by  men  who  had  little  or  no  know 
ledge  of  the  languages  in  which  they  were  written,  can 
become  binding  on  us  by  the  fact  that  they  have  been  ac 
cepted  by  men  equally  unlearned.  And  our  acceptance  or 
rejection  of  the  Apocalypse  does  not  depend  on  our  ascer 
taining  whether  or  not  the  book  was  included  in  the  Canon  of 
Laodicea.  If  it  seem  to  us  that  God  must  have  miraculously 
interfered  in  the  fifth  century,  had  it  been  then  necessary,  in 


542         THE  SECOND  EPISTLE  OF  ST.  PETER.      [XXV. 

order  to  prevent  an  uninspired  book  from  being  accepted  as 
inspired,  there  seems  an  equal  necessity  for  miraculous  inter 
ference  in  the  two  previous  centuries  to  prevent  an  inspired 
book  from  being  rejected  as  spurious,  by  men  whose  souls 
were  as  dear  to  God  as  those  of  their  posterity.  I  confess 
my  inability  to  find  out  by  the  '  high  priori  road  '  in  what  way 
God  must  deal  with  His  Church  ;  and  I  have  faith  to  believe 
that  the  course  by  which  He  has  actually  guided  her  will 
prove  to  be  right,  even  though  it  do  not  agree  with  our  pre 
conceptions. 

Proceeding,  then,  with  the  inquiry,  we  have  to  notice  the 
use  made  of  Jude's  Epistle.  The  coincidences  between  the 
second  chapter  of  2  Peter  and  the  Epistle  of  Jude  are  so 
numerous,  that  it  is  beyond  dispute  that  the  one  writer  used 
the  work  of  the  other.  I  have  carefully  read  the  very  able 
argument  by  which  Professor  Lumby,  in  the  Speaker's  Com 
mentary,  maintains  the  priority  of  Peter's  Epistle.  But  I  am 
unconvinced  by  it,  and  adhere  to  the  opinion  of  the  great 
majority  of  critics,  that  the  priority  rests  with  Jude.  To  take 
but  one  example  :  instead  of  regarding  the  verse  in  which 
Jude  speaks  about  the  body  of  Moses  to  be,  as  Professor 
Lumby  holds,  an  expansion  of  the  corresponding  verse  in 
Peter,  I  think  the  latter  verse  is  scarcely  intelligible  if  we  had 
not  in  Jude  the  explanation  what  was  referred  to.  But  is 
there  anything  inadmissible  in  the  supposition  that  one 
Apostle  should  use  the  work  of  another  ?  I  have  already 
observed  that  Peter  in  his  First  Epistle  certainly  uses  the 
Epistle  to  the  Romans,  a  work  which  we  need  not  doubt  was 
in  his  readers'  hands.  Why  should  he  not  here  make  still 
larger  employment  of  Jude's  Epistle,  a  work  which  (as  we 
may  infer  from  the  copiousness  of  his  use)  he  judged  to  be  not 
likely  to  be  known  to  his  readers.  In  early  times  there  was 
far  less  scruple  about  unacknowledged  borrowing  than  at  the 
present  day.  At  the  present  day,  indeed,  in  addresses  not 
intended  to  go  beyond  the  immediate  audience,  a  speaker  has 
not  much  scruple  in  using  words  not  his  own  if  they  best  ex 
press  his  ideas,  and  if  they  are  not  likely  to  be  familiar  to  his 
hearers.  Before  the  invention  of  printing,  each  writer  must 
have  felt  himself  to  be  addressing  a  circle  nearly  as  limited 


XXV.]  COMPARED   WITH   THE   FIRST   EPISTLE.  543 

as  that  addressed  by  a  preacher  of  the  present  day,  and  could 
not  count  that  things  he  had  read  himself  would  be  likely  to 
be  known  to  his  readers  also.  And  since  an  Apostle's  letters 
were  not  prompted  by  vanity  of  authorship,  but  by  anxiety  to 
impress  certain  lessons  on  his  readers,  I  do  not  see  why  he 
should  have  thought  himself  bound  to  abstain  from  using  the 
words  of  another,  if  they  seemed  to  him  most  likely  to  make 
the  impression  he  desired.*  But  what  strikes  me  as  really 
remarkable  is  the  great  freedom  with  which  Peter  uses  the 
work  of  his  predecessor.  In  some  places  we  might  imagine 
that  the  two  writers  were  translating  independently  from  the 
same  Aramaic,  if  the  coincidences  in  the  Greek  of  other 
places  did  not  exclude  that  supposition.  The  variations  are 
at  times  so  considerable  as  to  make  us  doubt  whether  Peter 
could  have  had  Jude's  Epistle  before  him  when  he  was 
writing.  And  the  idea  even  occurs  whether  it  may  not  pos 
sibly  be  that  Peter  was  writing  from  recollection,  not  of  what 
he  had  read,  but  of  what  he  had  heard.  I  may  mention  one 
difference  between  the  parallel  passages  in  Jude  and  in 
2  Peter,  that  whereas  in  the  latter  the  censures  are  plainly 
directed  against  false  teachers,  this  is  not  clearly  so  in  Jude, 
where,  for  all  that  appears,  the  objects  of  censure  may  be 
only  men  of  corrupt  heart  who  somehow  had  found  their  way 
into  the  Church,  but  whose  immoral  lives  showed  that  they 
ought  never  to  have  been  admitted  (see  p.  525). 

I  come  now  to  the  objection  noticed  by  Jerome,  founded 
on  the  difference  of  style  between  the  two  Petrine  Epistles. 
And  it  must  be  admitted  that  such  a  difference  exists.  It 
does  not  count  for  much  that  the  Second  Epistle  contains 
many  unusual  words,  for  it  has  not  more  than  its  fair  propor 
tion  of  a?ra£  Xeyo/^eva.  Leusdenf  counts  1686  in  the  whole 
N.  T.,  or  about  one  word  in  three;  for  he  computes  the  whole 
vocabulary  as  limited  to  4956  words.  Of  these  U7ra£  Xeyo/xeva, 
there  are  fifty-eight  in  i  Peter,  and  forty-eight  in  2  Peter, 
numbers  which  fairly  correspond  to  the  lengths  of  the  two 
Epistles.  But  the  following  points  of  dissimilarity  have  been 

*  The  identity  of  certain  portions  of  the  prophecies  of  Isaiah  and  of 
Micah  is  a  fact  of  the  same  kind. 

f  Compendium  Grcccum  N.  T.  (Preface), 


544  THE    SECOND    EPISTLE    OF   ST.    PETER.  [XXV. 

noted:  (a)  the  Second  Epistle  differs  from  the  First  in  fondness 
for  repetitions  of  words  and  phrases  :  thus,  Supeofuu,  i.  3,  4 ; 
cbrwAeia,  ii.  i   (bis),  3,  iii.  7,   1 6  ;  Si'/catos,  i.  13,  ii.  7,  8  (bis); 
(f>0opd,  (f>0€Lp€Lv,  i.  4,  ii.  12  (ter.),  19 ;  TrpocrSoKav,  iii.  12,  13,  14  ; 
cnrovSij,  o~7rou8a£eiv,  i.  5,  10,  I5>  iii.  14  ',  fUtrOfa  dSi/aas,  ii.  13,  15. 
(3)  The  particles  connecting  the  sentences  are  different,  par 
ticles  such  as  tva,  on,  ow,  ;aeV,  which  are  common  in  the  First 
being  rare  in  the  Second,  in  which  we  find  instead  sentences 
introduced  with  TOVTO,  or  ravra:  see  i.  8,  10;  iii.  n,  14.  (c)  A 
use  of  wg,  which  is  common  in  the  First  Epistle  (i.  13,  19, 
ii.  2,  &c.),  is  rare  in  the  Second  ;  where,  on  the  other  hand,  we 
have  a  common  formation  of  a  subordinate  clause  with  the 
preposition  ev  and  a  substantive  (e.g.  T?JS  ei/  &rt#v/ttp  <£0opas, 
1.4),  of  which  there  is  but  one  doubtful  instance  (i.  14)  in  the 
First  Epistle,     (d)  The  First  Epistle  makes  much  more  use  of 
the  Old  Testament  language.     In  Westcott  and  Hort's  table 
(ii.  1 80)  are  enumerated  thirty-one  O.  T.  quotations  in  i  Peter, 
but  only  five  in  2  Peter,  and  these  disputable,     (e)  ^wr^p  is 
frequently  used  in  2  Peter  as  a  title  of  our  Lord,  Trapovo-ta,  of 
his  second  coming,  the  word  eTn/yvoxn?  is  common,  &c.,  none 
of  which  words  occur  in  i  Peter.     But  in  these  instances  the 
usage  of  2  Peter  well  agrees  with  that  of  the  Pauline  Epistles, 
and  we  have  seen  that  the  use  of  Pauline  diction  is  a  charac 
teristic  of  the  First  Epistle.     With  respect  to  the  paucity  of 
Old  Testament  quotations,  it  may  be  observed  that  there  are 
no  such  quotations  in  St.  John's  First  Epistle,  though  it  is 
admittedly  by  the  same  hand  as  the  Gospel,  which  quotes  the 
Old  Testament  largely. 

On  the  other  hand,  Professor  Lumby  brings  out  with  great 
ability,  in  an  argument  which  will  not  bear  abridgment,  the 
features  of  resemblance  between  the  two  Epistles  (Speaker's 
Commentary,  p.  228) ;  see  also  Davidson,  ii.  462,  from  whose 
list  of  coincidences  I  take  the  following :  apery,  of  God  (i  Pet. 
ii.  9  ;  2  Pet.  i.  3) ;  aTroOccns  (i  Pet.  iii.  21  ;  2  Pet.  i.  14) ;  ao-TriAo? 
Kat  a/xa)/xos(i  Pet.  i.  19  ;  2  Pet.  iii.  14:  see  also  2  Pet.  ii.  13); 

£7r07TT€VeiV,    CTTOTTT^S   (i   Pet.    ii.    12,  ill.  2  J    2    Pet.    i.    I  6)  J     TTeVaVTCU 

a/xaprtas  (i  Pet.  iv.  i  :  cf.  2  Pet.  ii.  14).     None  of  the  above 

words  or  combinations  occurs  elsewhere  in  N.  T.*     When  it 

*  In  addition  to  the  above,  the  salutation  x<*Pls  fy*"7  K0^ 


XXV.]  ITS   ALLEGED    FAULTS   OF   STYLE.  545 

is  proposed  to  account  for  these  resemblances  by  the  fact  that 
the  author  of  the  Second  Epistle  was  confessedly  acquainted 
with  the  First,  we  must  bear  in  mind  what  has  been  already 
said  as  to  his  little  solicitude  about  designed  imitation.  It 
is  to  be  remarked  also  that  these  resemblances  are  not  con 
spicuous,  or  associated  with  repetitions  in  2  Peter  of  the  ideas 
of  i  Peter,  as  they  would  be  if  produced  by  design.  And  if  it 
is  urged  that  the  resemblances  are  few,  there  remains  St. 
Jerome's  way  of  accounting  for  the  absence  of  greater  simi 
larity  of  style  between  the  two  letters,  viz.  that  Peter  might 
have  employed  a  different  secretary  on  each  occasion. 

In  this  connexion  I  mention  some  of  the  coincidences 
noted  by  Professor  Lumby  (Speaker's  Commentary,  p.  226)  be 
tween  2  Peter  and  Peter's  speeches  in  the  Acts  :  Aayxavw,  for 
'to  obtain'  (Acts  i.  17  ;  2  Pet.  i.  i);  evo-e'ySeta,  in  a  peculiar 
sense  (Acts  iii.  1252  Pet.  i.  7) ;  evcre/^s  (Acts  x.  2,  7  ;  2  Pet.  ii. 
9)  ;  avopa,  '  of  things  '  (Acts  ii.  23 ;  2  Pet.  ii.  8)  ;  <£#e'yyo/>teu,  '  to 
speak  ;'  (Acts  iv.  18  ;  2  Pet.  ii.  16,  18) ;  ^/xe/oa  wptov  (Acts  ii. 
20  ;  2  Pet.  iii.  10) ;  /ucr0os  T^S  dSuaas  (Acts  i.  18  ;  2  Pet.  ii. 
13,  15);  €7rayetv  (Acts  V.  28  ;  2  Pet.  ii.  I,  5);  KoA.a£eo-0ai  (Acts 
iv.  21  ;  2  Pet.  ii.  9).  Only  one  of  the  above  occurs  elsewhere 
in  N.  T.  I  add  as  an  indication  of  early  date  another  coin 
cidence  with  the  Acts — the  frequent  metaphorical  use  of  ^  6Sos 
(Acts  xviii.  25,  xix.  9,  &c.  ;  2  Pet.  ii.  2,  15,  21). 

Dr.  Ed  win  Abbott  has  founded  (Expositor,  1882,  in.  204),  on 
the  style  of  2  Peter,  anew  argument  against  its  Petrine  origin. 
He  contends  that  the  style  is  not  only  unlike  that  of  the  First 
Epistle,  but  also  in  itself  so  ignoble  as  to  be  unworthy  of  an 
Apostle.  He  had  met  in  an  Indian  newspaper  with  some 
choice  specimens  of  'Baboo'  English,  in  which  the  author 
aimed  at  the  use  of  very  fine  words,  but  made  himself  ridiculous 
in  the  attempt  by  a  constant  violation  of  the  usages  of  the 
language.  This  suggested  to  him  that  the  Greek  of  2  Peter 
might  be  described  as  '  Baboo'  Greek,  full  of  pedantic  out- 
of-the-way  words,  and  of  words  improperly  used ;  and  while 

Qfl-r]  is  common  to  the  two  Petrine  Epistles.  Jude  alone  has  7r\r)0vvdfiii 
in  the  salutation  ;  and,  if  we  were  forced  to  choose  between  the  explana 
tions,  that  the  author  of  i  Peter  used  Jude,  or  that  Jude  used  2  Peter,  the 
latter  explanation  seems  the  more  probable. 

2  N 


546        THE  SECOND  EPISTLE  OF  ST.  PETER.       [XXV. 

thus  exhibiting  an  attempt  at  fine  writing,  really  so  barbarous 
in  its  style  as  to  be  almost  unintelligible.*  I  am  not  con 
cerned  to  defend  the  goodness  of  the  Greek  of  the  Epistle, 
but  we  have  cause  to  suspect  that  Dr.  Abbott  must  have 
much  exaggerated  its  badness  when  we  find  that  of  the 
Greek  fathers — whether  of  those  who  accepted  the  Epistle, 
like  Athanasius  ;  or  of  those  who  rejected  it,  like  Eusebius — 
none  seems  to  have  made  the  remark  that  its  Greek  is  abso 
lutely  grotesque  and  ridiculous.  In  respect  of  Greek  we  are 
all,  more  or  less,  Baboos  ;  so  that  if  2  Peter  be  written  in 
Baboo  Greek,  it  is  odd  that  it  should  have  been  left  for  a 
Baboo  to  find  it  out. 

But  if  Dr.  Abbott  had  completely  proved  his  case  it  would 
have  little  bearing  on  the  question  of  the  authorship  of  the 
Epistle.  Those  who  contend  for  the  Petrine  authorship 
would  feel  it  cost  them  nothing  to  admit  that  Peter  was  not 
a  good  Greek  scholar.  In  fact  there  are  many  who  have 
inferred  from  Papias's  mention  of  Peter's  '  interpreter,'  that 
that  Apostle  did  not  know  Greek  at  all.  Still  less  difficulty 
would  they  have  in  admitting  that  Peter's  '  interpreter,'  though 
probably  possessing  sufficient  knowledge  of  Greek  for  col 
loquial  purposes,  was  unskilful  in  the  literary  use  of  the 
language.  Everyone  writing  in  a  language  that  is  not  his 
own  is  liable  to  make  mistakes.  When  he  has  attained  so 
much  proficiency  as  to  be  able  to  avoid  offences  against 
grammar,  a  foreigner  will  still  betray  himself  by  a  wrong 


*  The  bulk  to  which  this  volume  has  swelled  induces  me  to  abridge  a 
discussion  on  which  I  feel  that  in  the  former  editions  I  had  spent  more 
pages  than  it  was  worth  ;  but  I  then  examined  with  some  minuteness  Dr. 
Abbott's  proofs  of  his  thesis,  and  I  showed  that  a  number  of  the  words  and 
locutions  which  he  characterized  as  out-of-the-way  or  improper  are  only 
so  as  not  being  found  in  the  Greek  books  now  commonly  read  in  schools, 
but  can  be  paralleled  in  the  works  of  later  Greek  authors.  In  the  course 
of  centuries  languages  are  liable  to  change,  and  judgments  formed  on  a 
thorough  knowledge  of  one  period  may  be  quite  inapplicable  to  another.  A 
critic  whose  knowledge  of  English  had  been  derived  from  a  study  of  Addison 
and  Swift,  might,  if  he  met  a  page  of  Carlyle's,  or  a  poem  of  Browning's, 
confidently  pronounce  it  to  be  the  work  of  a  foreigner.  And  the  same 
style  of  criticism  which  Dr.  Abbott  applies  to  the  Greek  of  2  Peter  would 
equally  prove  that  Tertullian  had  no  vernacular  knowledge  of  Latin,  and 
used  a  vocabulary  consisting  partly  of  words  of  his  own  invention,  partly 
of  phrases  pedantically  introduced  from  little-read  authors. 


XXV.]  ITS   ALLEGED   OBLIGATIONS   TO   JOSEPHUS.  547 

vocabulary,  from  time  to  time  using  words  in  a  way  that  a 
native  would  not  employ  them. 

As  far,  then,  as  the  question  of  authorship  is  concerned, 
the  only  one  of  Dr.  Abbott's  allegations  which  needs  to  be 
attended  to  is  that  the  Epistle  displays  such  '  ignobility  of 
thought'  as  to  be  unworthy  an  Apostle ;  but  this  is  sufficiently 
refuted  by  the  fact  that  in  order  to  make  the  Epistle  con 
temptible,  Dr.  Abbott  found  it  necessary  to  make  a  new 
version  of  it.  We  thus  see  that  its  faults,  if  faults  there  are, 
lie  in  the  language,  not  in  the  thoughts.  Done  into  such 
English  as  that  of  the  Authorized  Version,  we  all  feel  its 
grandeur  and  power.  But  no  translation  could  confer 
these  qualities  on  it  if  it  were  the  poor  stuff  Dr.  Abbott 
thinks  it. 

It  remains  to  examine  a  much  more  serious  assault  by  Dr. 
Abbott  on  the  Epistle.  He  undertook  to  prove  {Expositor, 
Jan.  1882)  that  the  writer  borrowed  from  the  Antiquities  of 
Josephus,  a  work  only  published  A.D.  93  ;  and,  if  so,  it  is 
clear  that  the  borrower  could  not  be  St.  Peter.  I  can 
honestly  say  that  I  am  conscious  of  no  prejudice  such  as 
would  preclude  me  from  giving  a  candid  consideration  to 
Dr.  Abbott's  proofs.  I  had  no  such  stubborn  belief  in  the 
Petrine  authorship  of  the  Epistle  as  would  render  me  incap 
able  of  giving  a  fair  hearing  to  opposing  evidence.  Though 
each  of  the  objections  brought  against  the  Petrine  authorship 
admitted  of  an  answer,  yet  their  combined  effect  produced  a 
sensible  impression  on  me  ;  and  one  difficulty  in  particular  I 
felt  very  much.  If  I  am  right  in  thinking  that  the  First 
Epistle  was  written  after  the  breaking  out  of  the  Neronian 
persecution,  and  if  St.  Peter  died  during  the  reign  of  the  same 
emperor,  no  very  great  interval  of  time  could  have  separated 
the  two  Epistles.  How  is  it  then  that  the  Second  should  not 
only  differ  a  good  deal  from  the  First  in  its  style  and  in  its 
topics— the  perils  which  threatened  the  Church  at  the  time  of 
the  First  Epistle  seeming  to  be  mainly  persecution  from  with 
out  ;  at  that  of  the  Second,  corruption  from  within — but,  though 
addressed  to  the  same  people,  should  differ  also  in  the  fate  of 
its  reception ;  the  First  becoming  rapidly  known  all  over  the 
Christian  world,  the  Second  so  little  circulated  as  apparently 

2  N  2 


548  THE    SECOND   EPISTLE    OF   ST.    PETER.  [XXV. 

to  run  some  risk  of  suppression?*  We  can  give  conjectural 
answers  to  this  question  ;  but  there  remained  enough  of  doubt 
as  to  their  correctness  to  make  me  willing  to  sympathize  with 
Olshausen,  who  says  :  '  Sentio  profecto  certis  argumentis  nee 
genuinam  nee  adulterinam  originem  epistolae  posse  demon- 
strari.  Rationibus  autem  subjectivis  fultus  authentiam  epis 
tolae  persuasum  habeo.'  But  subjective  reasons  must  give 
way  to  proofs  ;  and  Olshausen  properly  adds,  '  nisi  res  novas 
ex  historia  vel  ex  indole  epistolse  inveniantur  ad  litem  diri- 
mendam  aptiores  quam  hucusque  proponebantur.'  Such 
'res  novae '  seemed  to  be  offered  by  Dr.  Abbott ;  and  if  his 
arguments  forced  me  to  give  up  a  long-cherished  belief,  I 
should  at  least  have  the  satisfaction  of  seeing  clear  light  cast 
on  a  much-disputed  question.  I  therefore  read  Dr.  Abbott's 
Paper  without  having  made  up  my  mind  beforehand  that  he 
must  be  wrong  ;  and  I  was  much  impressed  by  the  case  he 
seemed  to  make  out  of  a  borrowing  from  Josephus  on  the 
part  of  the  writer  of  our  Epistle.  It  was  not  until  I  care 
fully  examined  the  matter  for  myself  that  I  arrived  at  the 
conviction  that  Dr.  Abbott's  discovery  was  merely  that  of  a 
mare's  nest. 

Archdeacon  Farrar,  indeed,  says  {Expositor,  in.  403)  that 
Dr.  Abbott  has  proved  'beyond  all  shadow  of  doubt  that 
Josephus  and  the  writer  of  the  Epistle  could  not  have  written 
independently  of  each  other;'  and  that  'it  would  be  impos 
sible  for  him  to  feel  respect  for  the  judgment  of  any  critic  who 
asserted  that  the  resemblances  between  the  two  writers  were 
purely  fortuitous  ;'  and  that,  '  were  the  question  unconnected 
with  theology,  no  critic  could  set  aside  the  facts  adduced  with 
out  being  charged  with  a  total  absence  of  the  critical  faculty.' 
So  he  leaves  us,  as  the  only  way  of  maintaining  the  Petrine 
origin  of  our  Epistle,  the  not  very  hopeful  line  of  defence  that 
Josephus  borrowed  from  2  Peter.  It  really  requires  some 
courage,f  in  the  face  of  so  magisterial  a  decision,  to  give 

*  I  may  add  that  the  readers  of  the  Second  Epistle  are  assumed  to  be 
in  possession  of  a  collection  of  Pauline  letters,  which  would  lead  us  to 
think  of  the  Epistle  as  later  than  the  Acts  of  the  Apostles. 

f  The  question  is  one  which  must  be  decided  by  arguments,  not  by 
authorities ;  but  I  may  mention  that  I  have  never  had  the  discomfort  of 
feeling  myself  quite  alone  in  my  opinion.  In  the  first  place,  the  two  or 
three  most  striking  coincidences  adduced  by  Dr.  Abbott  are  stock  quota- 


XXV.]          ITS   ALLEGED   OBLIGATIONS   TO  JOSEPHUS.  549 

utterance  to  the  opposite  conclusion  at  which  I  myself  arrived  ; 
but  I  cannot  help  thinking  that  the  Archdeacon  would  have 
expressed  himself  less  confidently  if  he  had  acted  on  Routh's 
golden  rule,  '  Always  verify  your  references.'  For  anyone 
who  merely  looks  at  the  coincidences,  as  set  forth  in  the  clever 
way  in  which  Dr.  Abbott  has  arranged  them,  will  easily  arrive 
at  Archdeacon  Farrar' s  conclusion,  that  there  has  been  borrow 
ing  on  one  side  or  the  other  ;  but  if  he  goes  to  Josephus  and 
looks  at  the  passages  in  situ,  he  finds  that  one  might  read 
them  over  a  dozen  times,  as  for  centuries  so  many  have  done, 
without  ever  being  reminded  of  2  Peter.* 

The  first  thing  that  strikes  one  on  a  comparison  of  the 
passages  is,  that  the  alleged  coincidences  relate  entirely  to 
words,  and  not  at  all  to  the  thoughts.  Josephus  and  2  Peter 
have  quite  different  ideas  to  express,  and  what  is  asserted  is, 
that  in  doing  so  they  manage  to  employ  several  identical 
words.  Now  the  case  is  just  the  reverse,  where  we  have  real 
literary  obligation,  as  in  the  instance  of  2  Peter  and  Jude. 
There  the  imitation  is  shown  chiefly  in  matter ;  in  words  very 
much  less. 

tions  from  Josephus,  used  for  the  illustration  of  2  Peter  by  commentators 
who  never  thought  of  founding  on  them  a  charge  of  borrowing.  Next,  I 
have  been  allowed  to  use  an  unpublished  criticism  o  fDr.  Abbott's  Paper, 
by  Dr.  Quarry,  who  takes  the  same  view  of  it  that  I  have  done.  And  he 
states  that  his  opinion  was  shared  by  the  late  Bishop  Fitz  Gerald.  Through 
the  kindness  of  Dr.  Sanday,  I  have  become  acquainted  with  an  able  Ameri 
can  criticism  of  Dr.  Abbott's  Paper,  by  Dr.  Warfield,  which  appeared  in 
the  Southern  Presbyterian  Review.  And  lastly,  Dr.  Gwynn,  who  was 
kind  enough  to  examine  into  this  matter  for  my  assistance,  arrived  inde 
pendently  at  the  same  conclusions  as  I  had  done  ;  and  has  given  me  many 
additional  reasons  for  holding  them. 

t  I  am  sorry  to  find  from  an  article  in  the  Expositor  (Jan.  1 888)  that 
Archdeacon  Farrar  is  much  hurt  by  the  suggestion  that  he  had  not  exa 
mined  the  passages  in  situ.  I  can  only  say  that  the  suggestion  was  not 
unkindly  or  insincerely  made.  I  thought  too  well  of  his  critical  ability  to 
believe  it  to  be  possible  that  if  he  had  carefully  looked  into  the  matter  he 
could  have  made  the  assertions,  the  erroneousness  of  which  I  expose  on  the 
next  page.  On  the  other  hand,  an  error  of  haste  seemed  to  me  very  probable ; 
for  my  admiration  of  the  high  qualities  of  the  Archdeacon's  work  is  con 
stantly  tempered  by  the  reflection,  how  much  still  better  the  work  might 
have  been  if  the  author  had  only  taken  a  little  more  pains  with  it  and 
spent  a  little  more  time  on  it.  Indeed  a  plausible  case  might  be  made 
out  that  Archdeacon  Farrar  had  not  taken  the  trouble  of  reading  the 
pages  of  this  book  which  he  undertakes  to  answer ;  for  he  so  completely 
ignores  all  my  arguments  that  I  now  find  nothing  more  necessary  in  the 
way  of  reply  than  to  reprint  without  alteration  what  I  had  said. 


550  THE    SECOND    EPISTLE    OF    ST.    PETER.  [XXV. 

But  Archdeacon  Farrar  states  that  the  two  documents 
have  in  common  '  words  in  some  instances  not  only  unusual 
but  startling,  words  which  are  in  some  instances  hapax  lego- 
mena,  occurring  together  in  much  the  same  sequence  and 
connexion  in  passages  of  brief  compass/  On  all  these  points 

1  take  issue  with  him. 

(1)  They  do  not  occur  in  passages  of  what  I  should  call 
'  brief  compass.'     The  words  common  which  come  so  close 
together  in  Dr.  Abbott's  report  of  the  evidence  lie  well  apart 
in  the  respective  authors.     Dr.  Abbott  gives  a  list  of  thirteen 
words  common;  but  these  are  taken  from  a  folio  page  of 
Josephus,  and  range  from  i.  3,  to  iii.  16,  in  2  Peter. 

(2)  They  are  not  'in  the  same  sequence  and  connexion.' 
The  words  common  which  Dr.  Abbott  letters  from  a  to  h 
appear  in  Josephus  in  the  order,  a,  g,f,  b,  h,  c,  d,  e  ;  in  2  Peter 
in  the  order,  g,  c,  d,  b,  h,  e,f,  a.     The  case,  then,  is  as  if  one 
finding  two  pieces  of  stuff  of  different  patterns  and  material 
should  fix  on  some  flowers  or  the  like,  occurring  here  and 
there  in  each :  should  cut  up  both  into  scraps,  construct  a 
patchwork  out  of  each,  and  then  say,  How  like  these  pieces 
are  to  each  other. 

(3)  But  the  most  important  point  of  all  is,  that  the  words 
common  are  not  '  unusual  or  startling,'  or  such  as  can  fairly 
be  called  *  hapax  legomena?     I  cannot  but  think  that  Arch 
deacon  Farrar,  not  having  looked  into  the  matter  for  himself, 
jumbled  up  in  his  mind  the  two  counts  of  Dr.  Abbott's  indict 
ment,  that  2  Peter  employs  unusual  and  startling  words,  and 
that  he   copied   from  Josephus.     Dr.  Abbott   himself  con 
fesses  with  the  utmost  naivete  (p.  211)  that  in  those  parts  of 

2  Peter,  where  the  unusual  and  startling  words  are  found, 
there  is  not  a  trace  of  obligation  to  Josephus  ;  in  other  words, 
that  if  we  find  in  2  Peter  a  word  likely  to  have  fastened  itself 
on  anyone's  memory,  it  was  not  from  Josephus  he  got  it.  And 
this  is  not  at  all  surprising,  for  Josephus  is  a  commonplace 
writer,  in  whom  many  startling  and  unusual  words  are  not  to 
be  found.     In  the  case  of  real  borrowing  between  Peter  and 
Jude,  some  of  the  words  which  are  common  are  very  striking 
ones. 

Now,  when  we  are  examining  whether  one  writer  is  under 


XXV.]          ITS  ALLEGED   OBLIGATIONS  TO  JOSEPHUS.  551 

literary  obligation  to  another,  everything  turns  on  whether 
the  phrases  common  are  unusual,  or  such  as  two  writers 
might  independently  employ.  What  first  roused  my  distrust 
of  Dr,  Abbott's  argument  was  the  total  want  of  discrimina 
tion  with  which  he  swells  his  list  of  proofs  with  instances 
which  prove  no  more  than  that  the  writers  compared  both 
wrote  h  Greek.  He  asks  us  (p.  54)  to  accept  as  a  proof  that 
one  wriier  copied  from  another  that,  in  speaking  of  the  rising 
of  a  hea/enly  body,  both  use  the  verb  dvareAAo);  and  (p.  57) 
in  considering  whether  2  Peter  copied  Josephus,  he  asks  us 
to  give  weight  to  the  fact  that  in  speaking  of  the  Divine 
power  both  employ  the  word  Suva/us.  This  reminds  us  of  the 
change  (see  p.  351)  that  Luke  was  indebted  to  Josephus  for 
his  knowledge  of  the  words  TVTTTO)  and  Tims.  It  is  clear  that 
if  Te  are  to  arrive  at  any  trustworthy  conclusions  we  must 
bejin  by  weeding  out  from  Dr.  Abbott's  lists  words  too 
conmon  to  aiford  any  proof  of  literary  connexion. 

Bit  in  deciding  what  words  are  to  be  so  regarded,  there  is 

a  qiestion  of  principle  to  be  settled.     Dr.  Abbott  allows  that 

if  wrds  common  to  Josephus  and  Peter  are  also  found  in  the 

LXX  we  cannot  treat  them  as  unusual  words,  being  bound 

to  acknowledge  that  if  Peter  borrowed  them  at  all,  he  may 

havetaken  them  from  the  LXX.  and  not  from  Josephus.     Dr. 

Abbctt  then  proceeds  to  argue:  Since  if  one  of  these  common 

word;  is  found  in  the  LXX.,  we  cannot  build  an  argument  on 

it;  therefore,  if  it  be  not  found  in  the  LXX.,  we  can.     And 

accordingly  he  classes  such  a  common  Greek  word  as  roiocrSe 

as  an  unusual  word,  because  not  found  in  the  LXX.     This 

argumnt  might  well  be  transferred  to  a  book  on  Logic,  as 

an  illutration  for  a  chapter  on  fallacies.     In  order  to  make 

the  logc  good,  we  must  supply  a  suppressed  premiss,  which 

Dr.  Abott  will  scarcely  venture  to  assert,  viz.  that  the  only 

two  sorces  whence  2  Peter  could  have  drawn  his  Greek  were 

the  LX:.  and  Josephus,  so  that  whatever  he  did  not  get  from 

the  onemust  have  been  taken  from  the  other.    But  every  one 

of  the  lew  Testament  writers  was  using  Greek  every  day  of 

his  life  and  it  is  absurd  to  suppose  that  the  men  of  that  day 

limited  heir  vocabulary  to  that  of  the  LXX.,  any  more  than 

in  our  aily  conversation  we  limit  ours  to  that  of  the  English 


552  THE   SECOND   EPISTLE    OF   ST.    PETER.  [XXV. 

Bible.  There  is  none  of  the  New  Testament  writers  who  does 
not  more  or  less  frequently  step  outside  the  Biblical  liirits, 
and  enter  into  those  of  secular,  and  even  classical  Greek.  But 
if  the  charge  of  Babooism  brought  against  2  Peter  be  well 
founded,  he,  of  all  others,  might  be  expected  to  be  leastlikely 
to  confine  himself  to  Biblical  limits.  For  in  the  sense  of  our 
discussion  a  Baboo  means  one  with  an  extensive  litenry  and 
very  little  practical  knowledge  of  a  language.  2  Pete'is  sup 
posed  to  have  got  up  his  Greek  from  solitary  reading  :  he  is 
censured  for  the  number  of  words  he  uses,  which  are  neither 
found  in  the  O.  T.  nor  in  Josephus ;  so  that  Dr.  Abbott  is 
the  last  who  ought  to  ask  us  to  believe  that  it  was  to  these 
two  books  he  confined  his  studies. 

But,  indeed,  I  must  give  up  the  attempt  to  save  Dr.  Abbctt's 
logic  ;  for  he  does  not  himself  pretend  that  2  Peter's  readvig 
was  limited  to  the  books  just  named,  part  of  his  indict 
ment  being  that  our  author  was  also  indebted  to  Phio. 
Dr.  Abbott,  indeed,  has  worked  this  vein  rather  superficialy; 
for  there  is  a  whole  host  of  2  Peter's  rare  words  in  Philc— 6 
7rpo<j>r)TLKos  Aoyos,  eTriXuo-is,  e/^Tropevo/xat,  vTroSety/Aa,  afleoxo?, 
aAaxris  and  Trapavo/xia  in  close  neighbourhood  (De  Mos.  i.  1:7)  '•> 
evTpv<f>av,  £o<£o?,  vTrepoy/ca,  SeA,ea£av,  crrot^eta,  pottos,  d/xi^ta, 
UTOTI/AOS  (De  Sac.  Ab.  et  Cain,  p.  165  ;  as  in  2  Pet.,  l  equ;l  in 
value,'  not,  as  in  Josephus,  to  whom  Dr.  Abbott  refer;  the 
word,  '  equal  in  privilege ') ;  and,  if  anyone  thinks  it  important 
to  add  it,  roiocrSe. 

For  my  purpose  it  is  immaterial  to  discuss  whethc  the 
possession  of  a  common  vocabulary  proves  that  2  Peter  opied 
Philo.  There  is  no  reason  why  the  Apostle  Peter  migit  not 
have  been  indebted  to  Philo.  Eusebius  (ii.  17)  repats  a 
story  that  had  reached  him,  that,  in  the  reign  of  CLudius, 
Peter  and  Philo  had  been  at  Rome  at  the  same  tine,  and 
had  conversed  with  each  other.  Eusebius  accepts  tb  story 
as  true,  and  believes  that  Philo  then  learned  fron  Peter 
many  things  about  Christianity.  I  do  not  myself  believe 
that  Peter  visited  Rome  at  so  early  a  time  ;  butPhilo's 
embassy  to  Caligula  is  a  historical  fact.  It  is  ration!  to  be 
lieve  that  Philo,  on  his  visit  to  Rome,  had  much  intercourse 


with  the  Jewish  colony  in  that  city ;  and  that  his 


votings 


XXV.]          ITS   ALLEGED   OBLIGATIONS   TO    JOSEPHUS.  553 

would  thenceforward,  if  not  before,  be  well  known  to  the  Jews 
in  Rome ;  and  might,  to  a  certain  extent,  influence  their 
vocabulary.  But  when  we  find  Philonic  words  in  N.  T. 
writers  we  are  not  bound  to  believe  either  that  they  took 
them  directly  from  Philo,  or  even  that  Philo  was  the  first 
to  use  these  words.  I  have  already  protested  against  Dr. 
Abbott's  tacit  assumption  that  the  '  linguistic  sphere  '  of  the 
contemporaries  of  2  Peter  is  adequately  represented  by  the 
meagre  remains  still  extant  in  the  LXX.,  even  including  the 
Apocryphal  books.  To  complete  that  sphere  we  must  in 
clude  the  works  of  Philo,  which  are  a  most  valuable  addition 
to  our  knowledge  of  the  theological  language  of  the  Jews  of 
the  Apostolic  age.  But,  though  Philo  may  have  enlarged 
that  language,  he  did  not  create  it.  It  follows  that  coin 
cidences  of  a  New  Testament  writer  with  Philo  are  not 
necessarily  proofs  of  borrowing. 

But  I  have  no  interest  now  in  contesting  that  point ;  for 
I  am  surprised  that  Dr.  Abbott  had  not  acuteness  to  see  that, 
in  endeavouring  to  establish  2  Peter's  obligation  to  Philo,  he 
was  doing  his  best  to  demolish  his  own  case.*  Josephus 
admired  Philo,  and  notoriously  copied  him  (Diet.  Chr.  Biog., 
iii.  452).  The  preface  to  the  Antiquities  of  Josephus,  which 
Dr.  Abbott  supposes  to  have  served  as  a  model  to  2  Peter,  is 
itself  derived  from  the  opening  of  De  Opif.  Mund.  of  Philo. 
When  we  turn  to  the  latter  passage,  among  the  first  things  to 
catch  the  eye  is  one  of  the  phrases  Peter  is  accused  of  bor 
rowing  from  Josephus.  The  TrXao-rois  Xoyots  of  2  Pet.  ii.  3  is 
alleged  to  be  derived  from  the  TrAaayxaTon/  of  Josephus  ;  but, 
in  the  corresponding  passage  of  Philo,  we  have  //.v^i/ons 
7rA.aoy/,acriv,  and  within  a  few  lines  /xv#ous  7rAacra/x,ei/os.  It  is 

*  Dr.  Abbott's  idea  is  that  the  theory  that  2  Peter  had  borrowed  from 
Josephus  would  become  more  probable  if  it  could  be  proved  that  this 
author  was  a  habitual  borrower,  destitute  of  all  originality.  It  is  scarcely 
a  paradox  to  say  that,  on  the  contrary,  this  author  was  so  original,  that  he 
hardly  knew  how  to  borrow  when  he  tried.  If  he  were  not  Peter,  it  was 
his  business  to  borrow  from  the  First  Epistle ;  but  he  scarcely  makes  an 
attempt.  He  knew  the  Old  Testament  history,  yet  he  has  extremely  little 
of  Old  Testament  language.  He  had  read  St.  Paul's  letters  ;  but  we 
should  not  have  been  able  to  prove  it  if  he  had  not  told  us  ;  and  yet  we 
can  distinctly  trace  the  use  of  Paul's  writings  in  the  First  Epistle,  though 
it  does  not  mention  Paul.  And  if  he  used  Jude's  Epistle,  he  exercises 
great  freedom  in  departing  from  his  original. 


554  THE    SECOND    EPISTLE    OF   ST.    PETER.  [XXV. 

not  clear  to  me  that  Peter's  phrase  was  derived  either  from 
Josephus  or  Philo  ;  but,  in  any  case,  if  Josephus  steals  from 
Philo,  how  can  he  claim  exclusive  rights  of  proprietorship  as 
against  Peter  ?  Why  are  we  to  suppose  that  Peter  took  from 
the  stream,  when  he  could  as  easily  have  drawn  from  the 
fountain  head  ? 

We  are  now  in  a  position  to  deal  with  Dr.  Abbott's  list 
of  coincidences.  We  first  strike  out  coincidences  in  common 
place  words ;  for  the  whole  force  of  the  argument  from  coin 
cidences  depends  on  the  rarity  of  the  words  employed.  Dr. 
Abbott  begins  by  inducing  his  readers  to  grant  that  two 
writers,  who  both  employ  the  phrase  *  golden  sleep,'  probably 
do  not  so  independently.  On  the  strength  of  that  concession, 
he  assumes  that,  if  two  writers  both  happen  to  say  '  I  think 
it  right,'  one  must  have  borrowed  from  the  other.  We  next 
strike  out  of  Dr.  Abbott's  lists  words  that  occur  elsewhere 
N.  T.,  or  LXX.  ;  for  even  one  such  occurrence  proves  that  the 
word  lay  in  Peter's  '  linguistic  sphere,'  and  therefore  that  his 
use  of  it  needs  no  explanation.  Such  words  are  e£oSos  for 
decease  (Luke  ix.  31:  not  used  in  Josephus  absolutely,  but 
with  the  addition  of  rov  £$v) ;  /xeyaXetor^s  (Luke  ix.  43  :  see 
also  Acts  xix.  27  ;  Jer.  xxxiii.  (xl.)  9);  €<j>  ocrov  (according  to 
Dr.  Abbott,  not  elsewhere  N.  T.,  but  actually  in  precisely  the 
same  way,  Matt.  ix.  15;  not  as  in  Josephus  with  the  addition 
of  xpoVov,  but  so  three  times  by  St.  Paul);  /x,v#os(four  times  in 
the  Pastoral  Epistles  ;  common  in  Philo) ;  0aos  (nine  times  in 
LXX.)  ;  //AXo)  (in  the  /xeAA^o-eo  of  2  Pet.  i.  12  there  is  a  difficulty, 
both  of  reading  and  interpretation ;  in  the  ov  /xeXXw  of  Jose 
phus,  a  common  Greek  word  is  used  in  the  most  common 
place  way).  I  think  it  needless  to  give  references  for  evo-c/3cia9 
Kara^povcw,  Trapwi/,  or  Suva/us  (!). 

The  combinations  of  words  on  which  Dr.  Abbott  lays 
stress  are  also  of  the  most  commonplace  character.  One  of 
the  most  remarkable  is  <S  KaXws  Troietre  Trpoa-exovres,  to  which 
there  is  a  parallel  in  Josephus.  But  KoAws  TTOICLV,  with  a  par 
ticiple,  is  common  N.  T.  (Acts  x.  33  ;  Phil.  iv.  14  ;  3  John  6)  ; 
and  Trpocre^w  is  also  a  common  word ;  and  that  two  common 
words  should  happen  to  be  combined  is  a  matter  calling  for 
no  remark.  So  also  pvOoL?  e£aKoXov0?7crcu/Tes.  'E£aKoXov0ect> 


XXV.]  ITS   ALLEGED   OBLIGATIONS   TO   JOSEPHUS.  555 

occurs  four  times  in  the  LXX.,  and  seems  to  be  a  favourite 
with  our  author,  who  uses  it  three  times  ;  and  we  have  seen 
that  it  is  a  mistake  to  treat  /av#og  as  an  uncommon  word.  In 
Josephus  there  are  two  various  readings,  and  it  is  not  certain 
that  e£a/coAov0e(o  is  his  word  at  all.  I  count  it  needless  to 
discuss  yivwo-Keiv  on  or  SIKCLIOV  ijycicrOai.  Nor  need  I  notice 
alleged  coincidences  in  which  there  is  no  resemblance.  Thus, 
Dr.  Abbott  swells  his  list  by  pointing  out  that  Josephus  has  the 
word  evaAcoTot ;  2  Peter,  in  quite  a  different  sense  and  context, 
cis  aXwcriv.  Another  case,  in  which  2  Peter  certainly  took 
singular  pains  to  disguise  his  theft,  is  that,  in  Dr.  Abbott's 
opinion,  he  derived  flec'as  Kotvan/ot  <£vVe<os  (i.  4.)  from  px/cpa? 
Kotvwvot  TaAaiTTwpias  in  Josephus.  But  if  2  Peter  was  incapable 
of  constructing  such  a  clause  for  himself,  he  had  a  much 
nearer  model  in  Philo's  Aoyi/o^s  KeKoivon/rj/cao-t  <£v'<rews  (De  Somn. 
i.  p.  647). 

When  Dr.  Abbott's  lists  have  been  thus  weeded  of  futilities, 
and  I  come  to  inquire  what  Archdeacon  Farrar  refers  to  as 
'  startling  and  unusual  words,'  or,  as  he  calls  them,  *  hapax 
legomena?  found  in  two  authors,  I  can  think  but  of  two  cases — 
that  2  Peter  uses  dpe-nj  concerning  the  excellence  of  God  ;  and 
that  he  speaks  of  the  divine  'nature'  0eia  <£vVis.  But  we  have 
ras  dpcras  concerning  God  in  the  First  Epistle  (ii.  9) ;  and  if 
it  had  been  Dr.  Abbott's  object  to  prove  that  it  was  thence 
2  Peter  derived  the  word,  he  would,  no  doubt,  have  laid  stress 
on  the  fact  that  in  both  places  it  occurs  in  immediate  con 
nexion  with  the  verb  KaAea>,  used  concerning  God's  call  of  His 
people.  The  word  is  similarly  used  O.T.,  Is.  xlii.  8, 12,  xliii.  21, 
on  which  latter  passage  that  of  i  Peter  is  based  ;  and  in  the 
singular,  Hab.  iii.  3.  But  in  Philo  the  word,  both  singular 
and  plural,  is  repeatedly  used  of  God.  Thus  :  uepl  0eov  /cat 
TWV  aperwv  avrov  (Quis  Rer.  Div.  Har.  p.  488)  ;  and  in  the 
same  page,  T?}S  #eia?  aperijs  rrjv  a/cpoT^Ta  :  and  TO  /xe'yeflos  TT/S 
apexes  TOV  //.eyaAov  0eov  (De  Somn.  I.  p.  635).  The  word,  then, 
plainly  lay  within  Peter's  '  linguistic  sphere,'  and  there  is  no 
pretence  for  saying  that  he  needed  to  go  to  Josephus  to  learn 
it.  And  the  same  thing  may  be  said  about  Ocia  ^vVis,  which 
is  also  a  Philonic  phrase  :  iJSet  yap  TI)V  <t>vo-iv  TOV  0eov  (De  Mos. 
ii.  p.  143  :  see  also  De  Spec.  Legg.  p.  343). 


THE   SECOND   EPISTLE   OF   ST.    PETER.  [XXV. 

Thus,  Dr.  Abbott  has  completely  failed  to  establish  his 
theory :  but  I  must  add  that  it  is  a  theory  which  it  was  never 
rational  to  try  to  establish.  For  what  are  the  ways  in  which 
an  author  exhibits  his  use  of  another  ?  (i)  He  may  take  his 
ideas  from  another,  following  out  the  same  arguments,  and 
using  the  same  illustrations  :  (2)  he  may  derive  from  his  pre 
decessor  some  word  or  combination  of  words,  such  as  two 
writers  would  not  be  likely  to  employ  independently :  (3)  he 
may  resemble  his  predecessor  generally  in  his  phraseology ; 
and  such  resemblance  of  vocabulary  would,  of  course,  not  be 
confined  to  one  particular  passage  of  his  author.  But  in  this 
case,  what  we  are  asked  to  believe  is,  that  2  Peter  prepared 
himself  for  his  task  by  studying  one  page  of  Josephus,  and 
then  tried  how  many  words  out  of  that  page  he  could  manage 
to  introduce  when  writing  on  quite  different  topics.  Did  ever 
forger  proceed  in  such  a  way  ?  If  he  did,  he  surely  took  for 
his  model  the  author  for  whom  he  desired  to  pass,  and  not  one 
his  knowledge  of  whom  it  was  his  interest  to  conceal.  I  must, 
therefore,  estimate  Dr.  Abbott's  speculation  at  the  same  value 
as  the  ingenious  proofs  that  have  been  given  that  the  plays 
of  Shakespeare  were  written  by  Lord  Bacon,  or  the  Epistles 
of  Clement  of  Rome  by  Henry  Stephens.* 

It  may  seem  that,  however  successful  we  are  in  refuting 
the  charge  that  2  Peter  copied  from  Josephus,  by  showing 
that  his  obligations  are  more  likely  to  have  been  to  Philo, 
yet  this  very  characteristic  of  the  Second  Epistle  makes  it 
impossible  that  it  could  have  the  same  author  as  the  First. 

*  I  refer  here  to  the  Proteus  Peregrinus  of  Mr.  Cotterill,  a  writer 
after  Dr.  Abbott's  own  heart,  who  employs  the  same  methods,  but  with 
greater  audacity.  He  shows  that,  not  only  the  Epistles  of  Clement,  but 
the  tract  of  Lucian  De  Morte  Peregrini,  the  Epistle  to  Diognetus,  large 
portions  of  the  Bibliotheca  of  Photius,  and  several  other  works  supposed 
to  be  ancient,  are  all  modern  forgeries.  When  it  is  objected  to  him  that 
the  Epistles  of  Clement  are  found  in  the  Alexandrian  MS.,  in  the  MS. 
lately  found  at  Constantinople,  and  in  a  Syriac  translation,  he  owns  that 
these  facts  do  present  a  certain  difficulty ;  but  declares  that  if  the  diffi 
culty  were  ten  times  as  great,  it  would  not  be  as  great  as  the  improba 
bility  that  the  coincidences  he  has  pointed  out  could  be  accidental  (p.  318). 
Reversing  his  argument,  I  draw  from  his  book  a  confirmation  of  my 
view,  that  coincidences  as  close  as  any  Dr.  Abbott  instances,  and  far 
more  numerous,  are  found  in  cases  where  borrowing  is  demonstrably 
impossible. 


XXV.]  ITS   ALLEGED   OBLIGATIONS   TO   JOSEPHUS.  557 

I  own  that  I  felt  some  surprise  on  being  taught  by  Dr.  Gwynn 
that  affinity  with  Philo  is  a  point  of  likeness,  not  of  unlike- 
ness,  between  the  two  Petrine  Epistles.  I  give  some  of  his 
proofs.  The  references  here  and  above  are  to  the  pages  of 
Mangey's  edition,  (i)  The  word  dvayevvaco  seems  to  have 
been  introduced  into  Christian  theology  by  i  Peter ;  it  does 
not  occur  in  any  previous  Greek  author,  but  must  have  been 
known  to  Philo,  who  uses  dvayeWryo-is  (De  Mund.  Incorrup.  p. 
489  ;  De Mund.  p.  609).  (2)  Again,  compare  the  vocabulary  of 
the  following  two  passages  in  i  Peter  :  TO  SOKI/UOV  TTJ<S 

TToXvTLfJiOTepOV  ^pVOTLOV  TOV  O.7ToX\VfJieVOV  SiO.  7TU/3OS 

£o/x,ei/ov  (i.  7)  ;  TO  Xoyi/cov  aSoXov  ydXa  (ii.  2  ;  dSoXos,  here 
only  N.  T.  ;  XoyiKos,  only  Rom.  xii.  i)  ;  with  Philo  (Alleg.  i.  59, 
in  immediate  connexion  with  TO  Xoyi/cdV)  fj  ^/aov^o-ts  rjv 
dSoXo)  Kat  KaOapa.  /cat  7T€7rvpa)ju,ev^  /cat 
L  TL/jLLa  ^>vVet.  Closely  following,  in  Philo,  we  find 
two  other  Petrine  words,  a<f>6apTo<s  and  a.7rove/x,co  (p.  6i),the  latter 
here  only  N.  T.  (3)  ov  <£0a/>Tois  apyvpiw  %  xpvo-iu(i  Pet.  i.  1 8)  ; 
Oycravpov  OVK  ev  <S  ^pvo-os  K°u  apyvpos  ovcrtac  <j>@apTal  KaTa/cecvTai 
(De  Cherub,  i.  p.  147).  (4)  CTTI  TOV  CTTLO-KOTTOV  TWV  i/^v^cov  (ii.  25, 
here  only  in  this  application  N.  T.) ;  but  in  Philo,  De  Somn. 
i.  634)  we  have  [®e<*>]  TU>  TWV  oXwv  ITTLO-KOTT^  :  and  it  may  be 
added  that  in  the  same  place  Philo  calls  God  TWI/  oXwv 
KTt'o-T^s,  this  title  being  given  to  the  Almighty  by  i  Peter 
(iv.  19),  who  alone  of  N.  T.  writers  uses  the  word.  (5)  An 
O.  T.  citation  is  made  with  the  formula  Trepi^L  only  N.  T.,  in 
i  Pet.  ii.  6  ;  but  also  in  Philo,  De  Air.  ii.  p.  i.  (6)  OTTWS  Ta? 
dpeTas  e^ayyetX^Te  (ii.  9)  ;  here  only  N.  T.  The  verb  in 
the  corresponding  place  in  the  LXX.  Isaiah  is  St^yov/xat ;  but 
Philo  (De  Plant.  Noe,  p.  348)  has  os  TOIS  [TWV  TOV  ©eov  epycov] 
V7rcpj3o\a<s  .  .  .  e£ayyeXet.  (7)  The  rare  word  dva^uo-is  (i  Pet. 
iv.  4)  occurs  De  Mundi  Incorr.  p.  507,  and  elsewhere. 

It  is  plain  that,  if  there  be  evidence  to  prove  that  2  Peter 
copied  from  Philo,  there  is  abundance  of  like  evidence  avail 
able  for  the  conviction  of  i  Peter.  I  will  not  undertake  to 
say  whether  in  either  case  direct  obligation  can  be  proved  ; 
and  possibly  some  things  which  we  might  suppose  to  be 
peculiar  to  Philo,  had  previously  formed  part  of  current  theo 
logical  language.  But,  at  the  time  the  First  Epistle  was 


55&  THE   SECOND   EPISTLE   OF   ST.    PETER.  [XXV. 

written,  Philo  is  likely  to  have  been,  for  a  dozen  years,  the 
author  most  read  by  educated  Jews  at  Rome  ;  and,  therefore, 
one  who  mixed  in  that  circle,  and  engaged  in  its  discussions, 
could  hardly  escape  at  least  indirect  influence  from  Philo. 
This  may,  perhaps,  afford  the  simplest  explanation  of  the 
Philonic  colouring  of  the  Epistle  to  the  Hebrews.  And 
Dr.  Gwynn  has  noticed  that  even  Paul's  letters,  written  from 
Rome,  present  coincidences  with  Philo.* 

I  do  not  think  it  worth  while  to  add  some  proofs  with 
which  Dr.  Gwynn  has  furnished  me,  that  the  charge  of  copy 
ing  from  Josephus  might  be  made  with  as  much  plausibility 
against  the  First  Epistle  as  against  the  Second.  But,  cer 
tainly,  the  result  of  an  examination  of  Dr.  Abbott's  argument 
has  been  to  emphasize  many  points  of  latent  resemblance 
between  the  two  Epistles.  If  the  Second  Epistle  copies  from 
Jude,  so  does  the  First  from  St.  Paul  and  St.  James.  Both 
letters  have  a  good  deal  in  common  with  the  diction  of  the 
Graeco-Jewish  literature  represented  for  us  by  Philo  and 
Josephus.  They  have  peculiarities  of  language  in  common, 
including  some  objected  to  by  Dr.  Abbott  as  if  only  found  in 
2  Peter.f  And,  as  Dr.  Lumby  has  well  shown,  it  is  character 
istic  of  both  to  use  striking  and  even  startling  expressions, 
and  to  introduce  unusual  and  mysterious  topics.  On  the 
whole,  Dr.  Abbott's  Paper  only  serves  to  show  how  an  able 


*(l.)    Philipp.    iii.    12  :    ovx  2rt  tfSri    .  .  .    TcreAetcw^oi,    SitaKw    He 
.  .   .  els  TO   PpafSf'iov. 

=  Philo,  Alleg.  iii.  p.  IOI  :  '6rav  rf\eiuOrjs   Kal 
<pdvwv  a^iuQfjs  (both  of  death). 

(2.)  ib.  iii.  2O  :  TJ/ULUV  yap  TO  TroAireuyUo  tv  ovpavols 

=  Philo,  De  Conf.  Lingg.  p.  41  6:  [the  souls  of  the  wise] 
€/ce?(re  ira\iv  tidev  wpfj.-ffdr]crav,  irarpiSa  peir  TOK  ovpaviov 
Teuoj/Tcu,   ^vov  5e  rbv  Trepiyetov  4v  $  TrapcpKijffav,  voftifawftu. 

Also  De  Joseph,  p.  51  :  e^if^vos  eyypafytiffdai  iv  T<?  fMeyiffry  Kal  api 
7roA.iTeu  /j.ar  i  rouSe  TOU  K6ffp.ov. 

(3.)    Coloss.    i.    15  :    8s  tffnv  et/c&i/  TOU  0eou  TOU  aopdrov,  TT/JCWT^TO/COS 


=  Philo,  De  Mundi  Opif.,  p.  6:    T^V  5e    aSparov   Kal    voi\rb 
\6yov  ei/coVa   \4yei   0eou. 

To  which  add  De  Somn.  i.  p.  653  :  .  .   .  6  K6ff/j.os  ev  $  Kal 
6   irp(ar6yovos  avrov  0e?os  \6yos.     Cf.  Heb.  i.  6,  ii.  17. 

t  Bunsen  (Christianity  and  Mankind,  v.  36),  in  a  vain  attempt  to 
discredit  i  Peter,  argues  from  the  close  resemblance  which  he  finds  be- 
tween  it  and  2  Peter,  and  which  he  tries  to  establish  by  enumerating 
several  thoughts  and  expressions  common  to  both. 


XXV.]          ITS   ALLEGED   OBLIGATIONS   TO   JOSEPHUS.  559 

and  accomplished  scholar  may  go  astray,  when,  on  the 
strength  of  a  comparative  study  of  one  New  Testament  book, 
and  a  few  pages  of  one  secular  author,  he  attempts  to  draw 
conclusions  which  could  not  be  safely  maintained  unless  they 
had  been  founded  on  a  thorough  investigation  of  a  much 
wider  subject — the  relations  of  New  Testament  Greek  to  the 
written  and  spoken  Greek  of  the  Apostolic  age.* 

*  Quite  lately  Mommsen  has  published  (Hermes,  xxi.  142)  from  a 
MS.  in  the  Phillips  Library  at  Cheltenham  a  previously  unknown  sticho- 
metrical  catalogue  of  the  books  of  the  Bible,  and  also  of  the  writings  of 
Cyprian.  The  list  had  been  made  in  Africa  in  the  year  359.  It  gives  the 
Gospels  in  the  order :  Matthew,  Mark,  John,  Luke.  Then  follow,  in  a 
singular  order,  the  Epistles  of  Paul,  among  which  that  to  the  Hebrews 
is  not  counted,  the  Acts,  the  Apocalypse,  and,  lastly,  the  Catholic 
Epistles,  as  follows  : — 

eplae  lohannis  III.  ur  CCCCL. 
una  sola. 

eplae  Petri  II.  ver  ccc. 
una  sola. 

Zahn  considers  the  '  una  sola '  as  a  protest  made  by  one  who  held  to  an 
older  tradition,  which  in  each  case  acknowledged  only  one  Epistle.  But  I 
am  disposed  to  agree  with  Harnack,  that  we  ought  to  supply  Judae  in 
the  first  case,  and  Jacobi  in  the  second ;  since  the  Epistles  of  Jude  and 
James  come  in  the  respective  places  in  the  Claroraontane  list. 


XXVI. 


NON-CANONICAL    BOOKS 


T  TAVING  in  Lectures  xi.  and  xix.  spoken  of  Apocry- 
•*•  -*•  phal  Gospels  and  Apocryphal  Acts,  I  now  add  a 
lecture  on  other  books  known  to  the  early  Church,  but 
which  did  not  find  admission  into  the  Canon. 

The  Apocalypse  of  Peter. — I  give  the  first  place  to  this 
work,  because  it  claimed  Apostolic  authority,  and  because  we 
infer  from  the  Muratorian  Fragment  (see  pp.  50,  225),  that  it 
had  obtained  a  place,  though  not  an  undisputed  place,  in 
Church  reading  before  the  end  of  the  second  century.  With 
regard  to  its  contents  we  have  only  positive  information  as  to 
two  passages,  both  indicating  that  the  book  contained  a  de 
scription  of  the  Last  Judgment.  One  of  these  is  preserved  by 
Clement  of  Alexandria  in  the  Prophetic  Selections  (41,  48), 
which,  according  to  the  general  opinion  of  scholars,  formed 
part  of  his  Hypotyposeis.  Clement,  who  is  habitually  indiscri 
minate  in  his  reception  of  books,  cites  this  Apocalypse  as 
a  genuine  Petrine  work*  and  as  Scripture  ;  but  the  extract 
which  he  preserves  gives  us  no  favourable  opinion  of  it.  It 
deals  with  the  future  condition  of  abortive  births,  and  of 
AMVU*^  children  born  in  adultery,  exposed  by  their  parents.  The 

*  Lipsius,  in  his  article  APOCALYPSES,  in  Smith's  Diet.  Chr.  Biog., 
states  as  on  the  authority  of  Eusebius  (H.E.  vi.  14),  that  Clement  reckoned 
this  Apocalypse  among  the  'antilegomena.'  But  it  was  Eusebius,  not 
Clement  who  so  reckoned  it.  What  the  passage  referred  to  says  is,  that 
'  Clement  in  his  Hypotyposeis  gave  short  comments  (5t7j77/<reis)  on  all  the 
Canonical  Scripture,  not  even  omitting  the  disputed  books,  viz.  Jude  and 
the  other  Catholic  Epistles  and  the  Epistle  of  Barnabas,  and  what  is  called 
the  Apocalypse  of  Peter.'  With  respect  to  Jude,  see  p.  493.  Clement 
repeatedly  quotes  the  Epistle  of  Barnabas,  and  appears  to  have  no  doubt 
of  its  Apostolic  origin ;  and  there  is  no  reason  to  suppose  that  he  thought 
less  favourably  of  the  Apocalypse  of  Peter. 


\jO\JuJr K(*\> 


' }  :. 

i. 


XXVI.]  THE   APOCALYPSE   OF    PETER.  561 


former,  it  says,  will  be  handed  over  to  an  angel  nurse 
rry/xeXov^w),  under  whom  they  will  receive  instruction,  and 
after  suffering  what  they  would  have  suffered  if  the,y  had  lived 
in  the  body,  will  attain  the  better  abode.  The  exposed  chil 
dren  receive  like  nursing  and  instruction,  and  grow  to  the 
condition  of  the  faithful  here  of  the  age  of  a  hundred.  On 
account  of  the  injustice  done  them  they  obtain  mercy  and 
salvation,  but  only  so  far  as  freedom  from  punishment.  I 
should  infer  that  the  writer  must  have  held  the  general 
necessity  of  baptism  in  order  to  salvation,  a  special  exception 
being  made  in  favour  of  these  murdered  infants,  who,  it  may 
be  remarked,  were  presumably  the  children  of  heathens. 
The  passage  goes  on  to  tell  that  the  bright  shining  of  these 
children  shall  strike  like  lightning  the  eyes  of  their  unnatural 
mothers,  from  whose  unused  milk  shall  be  generated  carnivo 
rous  little  beasts  which  shall  devour  them.  I  have  quoted 
these  puerilities  at  length,  because  the  passage  furnishes 
proof  that  the  Apocalypse  of  Peter  retained  high  consideration 
so  late  as  the  beginning  of  the  fourth  century.  Methodius 
(see  p.  393)  says:  'We  have  received  in  the  divinely-inspired 
Scriptures,  that  even  those  who  are  begotten  in  adultery  are 
handed  over  to  angel  nurses  (r^/xeAov^ots  ayyeXots).  For  if 
they  came  into  being  in  opposition  to  the  will  and  decree  of 
the  blessed  nature  of  God,*  how  should  they  be  delivered 
over  to  angels  to  be  nourished  with  much  gentleness  and 
indulgence  ?  and  how  could  they  boldly  cite  their  own 
parents,  before  the  judgment-seat  of  Christ,  to  accuse  them, 
saying  :  —  "  Thou  didst  not,  O  Lord,  grudge  us  thy  common 
light,  but  these  exposed  us  for  death,  despising  thy  com 
mand  "  ?  '  (Sjympos.  ii.  6).  There  can  be  no  doubt  that  what 
Methodius  here  cites  as  'divinely-inspired  Scripture'  is  taken 
from  the  passage  of  Peter's  Apocalypse  that  is  quoted  by 
Clement  of  Alexandria. 

The  other  extant  passage  of  this  Apocalypse  is  pre 
served  by  Macarius  Magnes  (see  p.  163).  We  can  infer  that 
at  the  very  end  of  the  fourth  century  it  had  not  quite  lost 
its  consideration.  The  heathen  objector,  as  if  the  book  were 

*  The  reader  will  note  the  0eoG  tyvffis  (see  p.  555). 
2  O 


562  NON-CANONICAL    BOOKS.  [XXVI. 

recognized  by  Christians  as  an  authority,  selects  a  saying 
of  it  for  attack — '  The  earth  shall  present  all  to  God  in 
the  Day  of  Judgment,  and  itself  shall  then  be  judged 
with  the  heaven  that  surrounds  it.'  Macarius,*  in  reply, 
remarks  that  it  will  not  avail  him  to  decline  the  authority 
of  that  Apocalypse,  the  same  doctrine  being  taught  in  Is. 
xxxiv.  4,  and  Matt.  xxiv.  35. 

I  quoted  (p.  476)  the  formal  judgment  of  Eusebius  (iii.  25) 
about  this  book.  He  places  it  with  the  Epistle  of  Barnabas, 
and  the  Shepherd  of  Hermas  in  the  second  rank  of  disputed 
books  (which  he  calls  voOa),  or  books  not  canonical,  but  known 
to  most  ecclesiastical  writers,  and  which  stand  on  a  different 
level  from  books  of  heretical  origin  (among  which  he  names 
the  Gospel  of  Peter),  which  no  ecclesiastical  writer  has  deemed 
it  fit  to  make  use  of.  In  an  earlier  passage  (iii.  3)  Eusebius 
has  with  less  discrimination  lumped  together  all  the  Apocry 
phal  books  ascribed  to  Peter  (the  Gospel  of  Peter,  the  Acts 
of  Peter,  the  Preaching  of  Peter,  and  the  Revelation  of  Peter), 
as  not  received  among  Catholics,  no  ecclesiastical  writer 
either  of  former  days  or  his  own  having  used  testimonies 
from  them.  We  have  seen  that  the  last  sentence  is  too 
strongly  worded,  as  far  as  the  Apocalypse  of  Peter  is  con 
cerned  ;  but  there  can  be  no  doubt  that  Eusebius  is,  in  the 
main,  right  as  to  the  weakness  of  external  attestation  for  the 
book.  And  that  it  had  generally  dropped  out  of  Church 
reading  in  his  time  may  be  inferred  from  his  classing  it 
not  with  the  minor  Catholic  Epistles,  but  with  the  Epistle 
of  Barnabas  and  the  Shepherd  of  Hermas.  But  a  hundred 
years  after  the  death  of  Eusebius  its  use  was  not  absolutely 
extinct;  for  Sozomen,  in  speaking  (vii.  19)  of  singular  local 
usages  in  different  Churches,  tells  that  in  his  time  this  Apoca 
lypse,  though  regarded  as  spurious  by  the  ancients,  was  still 
annually  read  on  Good  Friday  in  some  Churches  of  Palestine. 
Its  continuance  for  some  time  in  Church  use  is  also  testified 


*  Many  critics  think  that  Macarius  has  preserved  portions  of  a  lost 
heathen  work  directed  against  Christianity :  I  now  incline  to  the  opinion 
that  Macarius  has  exercised  his  rhetorical  skill  in  writing  the  objections  as 
well  as  the  answers,  though  no  doubt  the  objections  were  such  as  he  had 
really  encountered  in  controversy. 


XXVI.]  THE   APOCALYPSE   OF   PETER.  563 

by  its  being  included  in  the  Stichomeiry  of  Nicephorus  (see  p. 
178),  where  it  immediately  follows  the  Revelation  of  St.  John, 
and  in  the  list  of  the  Codex  Claromontanus  (see  p.  473).    Both 
these  authorities   agree  in  making  the  length   of  the  book 
something  less  than  a  quarter  of  that  of  the  Apocalypse  of 
St.  John,  the  number  of  o-rt^ot  being  in  the  former  list  1400 
and  300,  respectively  ;  in  the  latter  1200  and  270.  It  has  even 
been  conjectured  that  this  had  originally  formed  part  of  the 
Sinaitic  MS.,  of  which  six  leaves  have  been  lost,  coming  be 
tween  the  Epistle  of  Barnabas  and  the  Shepherd  of  Hermas. 
These  leaves,  no  doubt,  contained  one  of  the  disputed  books  ; 
and  the  Revelation  of  Peter  is  not  too  long  to  have  been 
included  in  them.     But  it  is  doubtful  whether  it  was  long 
enough  to  fill  the  gap,  and  Mr.  Rendel  Harris  {Johns  Hopkins 
University  Circulars,   1884,   p.   54)  has  urged  the  preferable 
claims  of  the  Psalms  of  Solomon,*  which  originally  followed 
the  Canonical  books  in  the  Alexandrian  MS.    Each  page  of  the 
Sinaitic  ordinarily  contains  four  columns ;  but  the  poetical 
books  of  the  Old  Testament  are  written  in  o-rt'xoi ,  or  verses 
divided  according  to  the  sense,  and  with  only  two  columns 
on  a  page.      Now,  the  Epistle  of  Barnabas  ends  on  the  third 
column  of  a  page,  and  the  fourth  is  left  blank,  contrary  to  the 
scribe's  usual  practice.     This  would  be  explained,  if  the  book 
which  was  immediately  to  follow  was  poetical,  requiring  two 
columns  on  a  page.     Thus,  the  book  of  Malachi  ends  on  the 
third  column  of  a  page,  and  the  fourth  is  left  blank,  because 
the  following  book  (the  Psalms)  is  written  o-rt^SoV. 

It  is  barely  worth  while  to  mention  conjectural  attempts 
to  discover  traces  of  the  influence  of  Peter's  Apocalypse. 

*  As  it  does  not  fall  within  my  plan  to  treat  of  Old  Testament  Apocry 
pha,  I  content  myself  with  mentioning  that  these  Psalms  are  eighteen  in 
number,  and  were  probably  written  about  50  years  before  Christ.  The  list 
of  the  contents  of  Codex  A  shows  that  they  formed  part  of  that  MS.,  fol 
lowing  the  Epistles  of  Clement ;  but  these  pages  are  now  lost.  These 
Psalms  were  edited  from  another  MS.  by  Fabricius  in  his  Codex  Pseudep. 
V.  T.,  and  more  recently  by  Hilgenfeld  in  his  Messias  Judaorum.  In 
addition  to  the  proof  which  the  presence  of  these  Psalms  in  Codex  A  affords 
that  they  obtained  some  amount  of  circulation  among  Christians,  it  may  be 
mentioned  that  they  are  included  in  the  Stichometry  of  Nicephorus,  and 
that  they  are  made  use  of  in  the  Gnostic  work,  Pistis  Sophia.  That  work 
contains  several  Psalms,  some  of  which  are  adaptations  of  Psalms  of  David  ; 
others,  of  these  Psalms  of  Solomon. 

202 


564  NON-CANONICAL   BOOKS.  [XXVI. 

The  extant  fragments  of  the  treatise  on  the  universe,  by 
Hippolytus,  contain  a  description  of  the  unseen  world  and 
the  intermediate  state,  which  Bunsen  imagined  to  have  been 
derived  from  this  source.  With  less  probability,  Hilgenfeld 
claims  for  this  Apocalypse  a  passage  twice  quoted  by  Hip 
polytus  (De  Antichrist.,  15,  54)  as  a  saying  of  a  prophet,  but 
not  found  in  our  text  of  the  Old  Testament.  It  is  not  likely 
that  Peter  would  have  been  cited  as  '  the  prophet ;'  and,  not 
to  quote  other  instances,  we  have  seen  (p.  478)  that  early 
Fathers  sometimes  read  in  their  Old  Testament  text  passages 
not  found  in  ours.  From  the  assumption,  however,  that '  the 
prophet'  means  the  'Apocalypse  of  Peter,'  Hilgenfeld  draws 
a  startling  inference.  He  finds  further  on  (c.  68)  in  the  same 
treatise  of  Hippolytus  :  *  The  prophet  says  "  Awake  thou 
that  sleepest,  and  arise  from  the  dead,  and  Christ  shall  give 
thee  light ; "  '  and  he  concludes  that  the  original  of  this 
saying  is  also  to  be  traced  to  Peter's  Apocalypse,  whence 
it  was  borrowed  by  the  author  of  the  '  spurious '  Epistle  to 
the  Ephesians  !  Hilgenfeld's  discussion  is  to  be  found  in  the 
last  fasciculus  of  his  Nov.  Test.  ext.  Can.  recepf.,  2nd  edition, 
1884. 

I  will  not  speak  at  length  of  other  Apocalypses,  none  of 
which  can  be  called  really  early.  The  most  important  is  that 
of  Paul,  whose  account,  2  Cor.  xii.  2-4,  of  the  revelations 
with  which  he  had  been  favoured  offered  a  temptation  to  a 
forger  to  atone  for  the  Apostle's  silence  on  the  subject. 
Accordingly  we  hear  from  Epiphanius  (xxxviii.  2)  that  the 
Gnostics  had  an  dva/BaTiKov  HavXov,  which  professed  to  be  a 
secret  record  of  the  mysteries  then  revealed  to  the  Apostle. 
All  trace  of  this  book  has  been  lost.  That  which  has  actually 
come  down  to  us  as  the  'Apocalypse  of  Paul '  is  much  later. 
Sozomen,  in  a  passage  (vii.  19)  already  cited,  tells  that  a  work 
thus  inscribed  was  in  much  esteem  among  the  monks,  and  he 
reports  that  the  book  was  said  to  have  been  found  by  divine 
revelation  in  the  reign  of  the  then  present  emperor  (Theo- 
dosius  the  younger)  buried  in  a  marble  box,  under  what  had 
been  the  house  of  Paul  at  Tarsus.  Sozomen  ascertained  from 
an  aged  presbyter  at  Tarsus  that  this  story  was  not  true. 
The  same  Apocalypse  is  condemned  by  Augustine  (in  Johan. 


XXVI.]  THE   EPISTLE   OF   BARNABAS.  565 

Evang.  c.  16,  tract.  98).  It  is  to  be  found  in  Tischendorfs 
Apocalypses  Apocrypha  (1863),  and  more  recently  has  been  the 
subject  of  an  investigation  by  Brandes,  Visio  Pauli,  1885.  I 
content  myself  with  mentioning  that  the  appearance  in  the 
book  of  an  angel  Temeluchus  indicates  that  the  author  had 
studied  the  Apocalypse  of  Peter. 

The  Epistle  of  Barnabas. — A  second  work  included  by 
Eusebius  in  his  list  of  disputed  books  bears  the  name  of  a 
member  of  the  Apostolic  company,  the  Epistle  of  Barnabas. 
It  is  found  in  the  Sinaitic  MS.,  beginning  on  the  leaf 
where  the  Revelation  ends,  and  placed,  together  with  the 
Shepherd  of  Hernias,  as  a  kind  of  appendix  to  the  new  Tes 
tament  books.  Its  being  found  at  all  in  a  MS.  intended  for 
Church  use  seems  to  indicate  that  it  had  at  one  time  been 
used  in  the  public  reading  of  the  Church,  while  its  position 
at  the  end  shows  that  at  the  time  the  MS.  was  written  it  stood 
on  a  lower  level  than  the  Canonical  writings.  The  same 
thing  may  be  inferred  from  its  inclusion  among  the  '  antile- 
gomena '  in  the  Stichometry  of  Nicephorus,  where  it  follows 
the  *  Revelation  of  Peter.'  It  is  quoted  several  times  by 
Clement  of  Alexandria,*  who  calls  its  author  sometimes  the 
Apostle  Barnabas,  sometimes  the  Prophet  Barnabas.  Else 
where  he  states  that  he  was  one  of  the  Seventy ;  and  one 
passage  is  worth  quoting  as  throwing  light  on  the  authority 
which  Clement  ascribed  to  the  Epistle.  It  is  taken  by  Euse 
bius  (ii.  i)  from  the  seventh  book  of  the  Hypotyposeis : — 'Our 
Lord  after  his  Resurrection  communicated  the  Gnosis  to 
James  the  Just,  John,  and  Peter:  these  communicated  it  to 


*  Lightfoot  says  (Clement,  p.  12),  'Clement  of  Alexandria  cites  the 
"Apostle  Clement"  as  he  cites  the  "Apostle  Barnabas,"  one  of  whose 
interpretations  he  nevertheless  criticises  and  condemns  with  a  freedom 
which  he  would  not  have  allowed  himself  in  dealing  with  writings  regarded 
by  him  as  canonical.'  I  do  not  think  that  the  passage  referred  to  (Strom,  ii. 
15)  quite  warrants  the  inference  drawn  from  it ;  and  the  phrase  '  criti 
cises  and  condemns  '  is  certainly  too  strong.  Clement  is  engaged  in  show 
ing  that  all  sins  are  not  equal,  and  he  quotes,  apparently  with  approbation, 
an  exposition  by  Barnabas  of  the  three  classes  of  sinners  referred  to  in  Ps. 
i.  i.  It  is  scarcely  a  'condemnation'  of  Barnabas  that  he  goes  on  to 
mention  alternative,  or  even  preferable,  ways  of  making  out  the  three 
classes.  It  is  more  to  the  purpose  that  Clement  (Paed.  ii.  10)  corrects  the 
natural  history  of  Barnabas,  but  without  mention  of  him  by  name. 


566  NON-CANONICAL   BOOKS.  [XXVI. 

the  other  Apostles,  and  the  other  Apostles  to  the  Seventy, 
of  whom  Barnabas  also  was  one.'  Accordingly,  Clement 
would  regard  the  '  Gnosis,'  of  which  the  Epistle  under  con 
sideration  is  full,  as  really  a  divine  tradition,  though  only 
reported  second-hand.  Origen  also  appeals  to  the  '  Catholic 
Epistle  of  Barnabas'  (Adv.  Cels.  i.  63),  and  cites  it  as  Scrip 
ture  (Comm.  in  Rom.  i.  24).  These  two  Alexandrian  witnesses 
make  up  nearly  the  whole  of  the  testimony  favourable  to  the 
Epistle.  If  it  were  not  for  the  existence  of  an  early  Latin 
translation,  we  might  even  doubt  whether  it  was  known  at 
all  in  the  West  before  the  fourth  century.  One  coincidence 
with  Justin  and  Irenaeus  has  been  mentioned  (p.  535);  but 
in  another  place  that  admits  of  comparison,  an  allegorical 
interpretation  of  the  law  concerning  clean  and  unclean 
animals,  Irenaeus  (v.  8)  seems  to  be  quite  independent  of 
Barnabas  ( i  o).  Tertullian  (Adv.  Marc.  iii.  7)  appears  to  be 
clearly  indebted  to  Barnabas  (7)  in  describing  the  scapegoat 
as  pierced  and  spit  upon  ;  yet,  if  he  knew  our  Epistle  as  that 
of  Barnabas,  it  seems  strange  that  he  should  ascribe  the 
same  authorship  to  the  Epistle  to  the  Hebrews.  Jerome 
(De  Viris  Illust.  6:  see  also  Comm.  in  Ezek.  xliii.  16)  makes 
no  doubt  that  the  author  of  the  Epistle  was  the  Barnabas 
of  the  New  Testament,  but  says  that  the  Epistle  is  counted 
among  apocryphal  Scriptures.  Elsewhere  (Dial.  cont. 
Pelag.  iii.  2)  he  quotes  from  the  Epistle  a  saying  which 
had  been  previously  quoted  by  Origen  {Adv.  Cels.  i.  63)  ; 
but  he  attributes  it  to  Ignatius,  probably  through  lapse 
of  memory. 

Turning  to  the  internal  evidence,  we  find  the  contents  of 
the  book  such  as  certainly  would  not  make  us  wish  to  include 
it  in  our  Canon  of  Scripture.  To  cite  one  oft-quoted  pas 
sage,  Barnabas  misquotes  the  book  of  Genesis  (see  Gen.  xiv. 
14;  xvii.  27),  as  recording  that  Abraham  circumcised  318  of 
his  household,  a  number  expressed  in  Greek  by  the  letters 
TO].  It  does  not  appear  whether  Barnabas  called  to  mind 
that  the  book  had  been  written  not  in  Greek  but  in  Hebrew. 
At  all  events  he  expounds  that  117  denote  Jesus,  and  T  the 
cross ;  and  he  is  so  satisfied  with  his  exposition  that  he  adds, 
'  No  one  has  received  a  more  genuine  word  from  me  than 


XXVI.]  THE   EPISTLE   OF    BARNABAS,  567 

this ;  but  I  know  that  ye  are  worthy.'*  He  goes  on  to  ex 
plain  the  meaning  of  the  prohibitions  against  eating  the  flesh 
of  the  animals  counted  as  unclean,  of  all  of  which  he  gives 
spiritual  explanations,  in  which  the  natural  history  is  quite 
as  curious  as  the  theology.  These  spiritual  explanations 
constitute  the  '  Gnosis '  which,  in  the  mind  of  this  author, 
.gives  him  his  chief  claim  on  his  readers'  attention.  One 
example  will  suffice.  The  prohibition  to  eat  the  hyena 
means  that  we  are  to  avoid  adultery  and  other  such  sins ;  for 
this  beast  changes  its  sex  each  year,  being  one  year  male, 
the  next  female.  I  remember  that  when  I  was  a  young 
student  myself  I  heard  some  of  these  passages  quoted  in  a 
sermon  in  our  chapel  by  one  whose  memory  we  still  hold  in 
honour.  The  preacher's  view  was  that  the  Epistle  was  a 
genuine  work  of  the  Apostle  Barnabas,  and  he  produced  the 
passages  in  order  to  show  what  rubbish  an  Apostle  was 
capable  of  writing  when  he  was  not  inspired.  He  thought 
thereby  to  exalt  the  authority  of  the  inspired  Scriptures  as 
being  sui  generis,  and  unlike  not  only  the  writings  of  other 
men,  but  the  writings  of  the  same  men  when  not  inspired. 
His  object  was  to  establish  the  supreme  authority  of  Scripture, 
but  in  real  truth  he  did  just  the  reverse.  For  according  to 
this  view  the  authority  of  Scripture  must  yield  to  whatever 
authority  it  is  that  settles  which  of  the  Apostolic  writings 
are  inspired,  and  which  not.  I  own  I  know  no  proof  that 
the  Apostles  were  inspired  in  a  different  way  when  they 
were  writing  and  when  they  were  speaking;  and  in  a 
different  way  when  they  were  writing  some  books  and  when 


*  Many  of  the  Fathers  have  thought  this  exposition  worth  copying,  e.  g. 
•Clem.  Alex.,  Strom,  vi.  II,  p.  782;  Ambrose,  De  Abraha,  i.  15  ;  Pruden- 
tius,  Psychom.  57  ;  and  even  in  our  own  times  it  has  found  a  defender. 
Keble  (Tracts  for  the  Times,  89)  says  :  '  In  whatever  measure  the  fact  is 
made  out,  that  the  received  Greek  version  of  the  Scriptures  was  under 
a  peculiar  providence,  in  the  same  degree  it  is  rendered  not  improbable, 
that  even  in  such  an  apparently  casual  thing  as  the  number  of  Abraham's 
servants  there  was  an  eye  to  the  benefit  and  consolation  which  the  Church 
should  long  after  receive,  on  recognizing,  as  it  were,  her  Saviour's  cypher, 
in  the  account  of  the  one  holy  family  triumphantly  wrestling  against  the 
powers  of  the  world.'  The  Valentinians,  whether  deriving  their  method 
from  Barnabas,  or  discovering  it  independently,  found  their  18  Aeons  in 
the  first  two  letters  of  the  Saviour's  name  (Irenaeus  I.  iii.  2). 


5  68  NON-CANONICAL    BOOKS.  [XXVI. 

they  were  writing  others.  And,  as  I  have  said,  if  this  viev 
be  correct,  the  supreme  authority  in  the  Church  is  that 
which  brings  Apostles  to  its  bar,  tests  their  writings,  and 
assigns  to  some  the  attribute  of  inspiration  which  it  denies 
to  others.  But  what  that  authority  is  I  don't  know.  I  know 
that  the  general  sense  of  the  Christian  Church  has  refused 
to  put  the  Epistle  of  Barnabas  on  a  level  with  those  of 
St.  Paul ;  but  if  you  ask  by  what  tribunal,  or  by  what 
formal  act  this  conclusion  has  been  arrived  at,  I  should  be 
as  much  puzzled  as  if  you  asked  me  by  what  tribunal  it  has 
been  decided  that  Shakespeare  is  a  greater  poet  than  Beau 
mont  and  Fletcher.  Without  saying  anything  about  the 
Church's  claim  to  expect  Divine  guidance,  we  can  hardly 
refuse  to  yield  at  least  as  much  deference  to  her  decisions 
as  we  pay  to  received  opinion  in  matters  of  taste.  And 
so,  no  matter  who  wrote  the  Epistle  we  are  considering, 
we  shall  not  accept  it  as  inspired.  But  if  we  believe  the 
Apostle  Barnabas  to  have  been  the  author,  since  he  was  a 
man  who  in  his  lifetime  had  claims,  like  those  of  St.  Paul, 
to  be  God's  inspired  messenger,  we  require  a  theory  to  explain 
the  grounds  on  which  we  are  to  maintain  that  the  writings  of 
one  are  more  above  our  criticism  than  those  of  the  other.* 

It  is  perhaps  not  preparing  you  to  judge  with  quite  un 
biassed  minds  of  the  question  of  the  authorship  of  the  Epistle 
that  I  have  allowed  you  to  see  what  consequences  are  likely 
to  follow  if  the  Apostolic  authority  be  conceded.  But  judges 
who  are  above  being  prejudiced  by  considerations  of  this 
sort,  and  who  would  have  no  difficulty  in  believing  Apostles 
to  have  been  guilty  of  any  amount  of  error,  have  pretty 
unanimously  decided  that  the  Epistle  was  written  at  a  later 
time  than  Barnabas  is  likely  to  have  lived  to,  and  that  the 
author  is  a  different  manner  of  man  from  what  the  historical 
Barnabas  is  described  as  having  been.  The  main  argument 
is  derived  from  the  whole  attitude  of  the  writer  towards  Juda 
ism.  The  historical  Barnabas  was  a  Levite,  and  was  trusted 
by  the  Jerusalem  Church,  to  whom  he  introduced  Paul.  In 

*  Westcott,  for  example,  holds  (N.  T.  Canon,  p.  42)  that  Barnabas  can 
in  no  case  be  ranked  with  the  Twelve,  or  St.  Paul,  not  having  received  his 
Apostolate  directly  from  our  Lord,  as  they  did. 


XXVI.]  THE    EPISTLE    OF    BARNABAS.  569 

his  only  difference  with  St.  Paul  on  the  subject  of  Judaism 
he  erred  by  too  great  concessions  to  the  Jewish  party.  Now 
the  writer  of  the  Epistle  does  not  show  that  acquaintance 
with  Jewish  rites  which  the  Levite  Barnabas  must  have  had. 
I  exemplified  to  you,  in  the  case  of  the  number  318,  that  he 
does  not  quote  the  Old  Testament  accurately.  In  fact  gross 
inaccuracy  is  the  rule  with  him  ;  and  in  his  account  of  Jewish 
rites  (and  on  the  symbolizing  of  Christ  by  these  rites  he 
builds  many  arguments)  he  deviates  widely  from  the  Old 
Testament.  Nor  can  we  have  recourse  to  the  supposition 
that  the  rites  traditionally  practised  in  Jerusalem  at  that  time 
differed  from  those  prescribed  in  the  Old  Testament ;  for  the 
Talmud,  which  may  be  supposed  to  have  preserved  Jewish 
traditions,  gives  the  so-called  Barnabas  as  little  countenance 
as  the  Old  Testament  does. 

But  more  remarkable  even  than  his  inaccuracy  in  speaking 
of  Jewish  institutions  is  his  total  want  of  respect  for  them. 
He  does  not  look  on  the  performance  of  the  Jewish  rites  as 
introductory  and  preparatory  for  Christ,  but  as  a  gross  sin — 
a  misconception  of  the  true  meaning  of  the  law.  He  has  a 
spiritual  exposition  for  the  Mosaic  precepts,  and  he  holds  that 
the  Jews,  by  taking  them  literally,  excluded  themselves  from 
God's  covenant.  He  even  represents  the  Jews  as  deceived 
by  an  evil  angel.  Paul  forbade  the  Gentiles  to  be  circumcised ; 
but,  in  Acts  xxi.,  the  statement  is  repelled  as  a  calumny  that 
he  taught  the  Jews  to  forsake  Moses,  and  not  to  circumcise 
their  children  nor  walk  after  the  customs.  This  writer,  under 
the  name  of  Barnabas,  would  seem  to  condemn  the  Jews  for 
having  observed  such  customs  even  before  our  Lord's  coming. 
And  his  whole  tone  of  feeling  towards  the  Jewish  nation  is 
such,  that  when  I  balance  the  probabilities  that  a  born  Gentile 
should  acquire  as  much  knowledge  of  the  Old  Testament  as 
this  writer  displays,  or  that  a  born  Jew  should  come  to  feel 
towards  his  own  nation  so  completely  as  an  outsider,  I  prefer 
to  embrace  the  former  probability.* 

*  It  is  worth  while,  in  this  point  of  view,  to  compare  this  Epistle  with 
the  Gospel  according  to  St.  John,  which  has  been  characterized  by  some 
critics  as  '  anti- Jewish'  (see  pp.  23,  277),  but  which  will  be  seen  to  be  in 
tensely  Jewish  as  compared  with  Barnabas. 


5?0  NON-CANONICAL   BOOKS.  [xXVl. 

A  less  formidable  difficulty  in  the  way  of  ascribing  the 
authorship  to  the  Apostle  Barnabas  arises  from  the  date  of  the 
Epistle.  There  is  a  range  of  some  forty  or  fifty  years  within 
which  the  date  may  lie  ;  but  it  is  certain  (ch.  16)  that  it  is  later 
than  the  destruction  of  Jerusalem.  Now  (see  p.  466)  we  should 
not  expect  to  find  the  Apostle  Barnabas  in  activity  so  late;  and 
the  silence  of  Paul's  later  Epistles  about  him  might  lead  us  to 
think  he  had  died  before  Paul.  But  this  is  only  a  presumption 
which  must  yield  to  any  good  evidence  on  the  other  side ; 
and  Paul's  silence  would  be  accounted  for  if  Barnabas  had 
gone  off  to  work  in  a  completely  different  sphere — for  ex 
ample,  Egypt.  A  limit  in  the  other  direction  to  the  date  of 
the  Epistle  is  furnished  by  its  complete  silence  as  to  any  of 
the  Gnostic  theories  which  caused  so  much  controversy  in  the 
Church  quite  early  in  the  second  century.  The  anti-Judaism 
of  the  Epistle  might  make  us  think  of  Marcion  ;  but  the 
Epistle  is  distinctly  pre-Marcionite,  there  being  not  the  least 
trace  of  any  of  the  notions  peculiar  to  that  heretic.*  On  these 
grounds  the  Epistle  cannot  be  dated  later  than  A.  D.  120. 
There  are  two  passages  which  have  been  used  to  determine 
more  precisely  the  date  of  the  Epistle.  In  ch.  4,  in  proof  that 
the  last  days  are  at  hand,  he  quotes  Daniel's  prophecies  (vii. 
8,  24)  often  kings,  and  of  one  king  overthrowing  three  others. 
He  does  not  enter  into  the  question  how  the  ten  kings  were 
to  be  made  out,  but  merely  remarks,  '  ye  ought  therefore  to 
understand.'  The  brevity  of  this  comment  indicates  that 
Barnabas  found  the  fulfilment  of  the  prophecy  in  some 
patent  fact,  and  not  in  one  requiring  historical  or  chrono 
logical  studies  to  discover  it.  I  therefore  know  no  explana 
tion  of  his  words  so  natural  as  that  the  Epistle  was  written 
in  the  reign  of  Vespasian.  It  is  true  that  a  historical 
student  might  discover  that,  counting  Julius  Caesar,  Ves 
pasian  was  only  the  tenth  emperor,  while  Daniel's  words 

*  With  regard  to  the  suggestion,  thrown  out  p.  457,  that  this  may  be 
the  Epistle  to  the  Alexandrians  rejected,  on  account  of  its  Marcionite  ten 
dencies,  in  the  Muratorian  Fragment,  it  must  be  borne  in  mind  that  even 
if  our  Epistle  was  really  addressed  to  the  Alexandrians,  there  is  no  evi 
dence  that  it  ever  bore  that  title ;  and  that  it  is  even  doubtful  whether  it 
was  known  in  the  West  at  the  date  of  that  Fragment. 


XXVI.]  THE   EPISTLE   OF   BARNABAS.  571 

would  lead  us  to  think  of  his  '  little  horn '  as  representing 
an  eleventh  king ;  but  Barnabas  is  one  of  the  last  writers 
from  whom  minute  accuracy  of  interpretation  need  be  ex 
pected.  If  he  lived  in  the  reign  of  Vespasian,  the  rapid 
overthrow  in  succession  of  three  emperors,  Galba,  Otho, 
and  Vitellius,  might  naturally  make  him  think  that  he  was 
witnessing  a  fulfilment  of  Daniel's  prophecy  of  one  king 
subduing  three.  I  know  no  other  time  when  his  language 
would  be  natural.  On  this  account,  though  some  other 
considerations  would  induce  me  to  push  down  the  date  of 
the  Epistle  to  the  second  century,  I  find  it  hard  to  resist  the 
inference  that  we  must  ascribe  it  to  the  reign  of  Vespasian, 
A.  D.  70-79.  In  the  other  passage  (16)  he  quotes  the  pro 
phecy  '  They  that  destroyed  this  temple  shall  themselves 
build  it  up  again,'*  and  adds,  'and  so  it  comes  to  pass. 
Through  their  making  war  it  was  destroyed  by  their  enemies; 
and  now  both  they  and  the  servants  of  their  enemies  shall 
build  it  up  again.'  It  has  been  supposed  that  this  refers  to 
some  attempts  to  rebuild  the  Temple  in  the  reign  of  Hadrian; 
but  I  find  no  evidence  of  anything  of  the  kind  to  give  a 
probable  explanation  of  the  language  of  Barnabas ;  and  it 
seems  to  me  plain  from  the  rest  of  the  chapter  that  it  is  in  the 
building  up  of  a  spiritual  temple  that  he  finds  the  fulfilment  of 
the  prophecy.  The  argument,  therefore,  for  the  earlier  date, 
drawn  from  the  former  passage,  remains  undisturbed. 

There  is  nothing  in  the  letter  itself  to  determine  the  place 
to  which  it  was  addressed;  but  since  it  is  from  Alexandria  we 
first  hear  of  it,  it  seems  probable  enough  that  it  was  sent  to 
that  city.  Alexandria  contained  a  large  Jewish  population, 
and  thus  the  conflict  with  Judaism  would  there  occupy  much 
of  Christian  attention.  Possibly,  too,  some  Jewish  rites  may 
have  been  different  in  Egypt  and  in  Palestine.  The  name 
Barnabas,  found  in  the  title  of  the  letter,  does  not  appear  in 
the  letter  itself.  All  that  we  discover  from  it  is  that  it  was 
written  by  a  Christian  teacher  to  a  Church  in  which  he  had 
himself  laboured,  and  to  which  he  was  accordingly  well 


A  free  quotation  from  Isaiah  xlix.  17  (LXX.)  :  rax"  oiKo$ojj.-r)d-f)<rri  IHJ>' 
teal  ol  fpij/j-uffavr^Q  ffe  eleAeucrovrat  eK  ffov. 


572  NON-CANONICAL   BOOKS.  [XXVI. 

known.  We  are  not  forced  to  suppose  that  it  was  written  from 
a  distance  :  the  author  may  have  merely  wished  to  leave  his 
people  a  written  record  of  his  teaching.  If  the  author  was 
not  the  Apostle  Barnabas — and  I  find  it  hard  to  believe  he 
was — the  question  will  be  asked  how  the  letter  came  to  bear 
his  name.  The  best  conjecture  I  can  make,  setting  aside  the 
guess  that  the  author's  name  may  really  have  been  Barnabas, 
is  that  the  Church  of  Alexandria  was  founded,  if  not  by  Bar 
nabas  himself,  by  men  of  Cyprus,  who  owed  their  knowledge 
of  the  Gospel  to  him,  and  that  so  his  name  came  to  be 
attached  to  a  venerable  record  of  early  teaching  preserved  in 
that  Church. 

The  Epistle  of  Clement. — This  venerable  document  has 
clearly  a  right  to  be  next  considered.  It  is  true  that  although 
Eusebius  Callsthe Epistle /xeyctX^,  Oav^aa-ia,  avw^oXoyrj^vr]  ?rapa 
Trao-iv  (iii.  1 6,  37),  he  does  not  include  it  in  his  list  of  ecclesias 
tical  books  (see  p.  475)  ;  and  even  if  the  omission  arose  from 
inadvertence,  the  possibility  that  the  book  could  be  forgotten 
shows  that  it  had  no  serious  pretensions  to  canonical  authority 
when  Eusebius  wrote.  But  it  had  evidently  made  a  profound 
impression  on  the  earlier  Church.  It  was  written  in  the 
name  of  the  Church  of  Rome*  to  the  Church  of  Corinth,  and 


*  Not  in  the  name  of  Clement,  which  is  not  once  mentioned,  and  which 
we  only  learn  to  connect  with  the  Epistle  by  independent  tradition.  In 
fact,  it  is  remarkable  how  all  through  the  first  two  centuries  the  importance 
of  the  bishop  of  Rome  is  merged  in  the  importance  of  his  Church.  In  the 
subsequent  correspondence  mentioned  above,  Dionysius  of  Corinth  writes 
to  the  Church  of  Rome,  not  to  Soter,  its  bishop.  Ignatius,  when  on  his 
way  to  suffer  at  the  wild  beast  shows  at  Rome,  writes  to  deprecate  inter 
cession  likely  to  be  there  made  for  his  release ;  and  he  addresses  the 
Church,  not  the  bishop.  And  it  is  curious,  that  from  this  writer,  who  is 
accounted  the  strongest  witness  for  Episcopacy  in  early  times,  we  could 
not  discover  that  there  was  any  bishop  at  Rome.  No  mention  is  made  of 
the  bishop  of  Rome  in  the  Shepherd  of  Hernias.  And  in  the  account 
which  Epiphanius,  evidently  drawing  from  an  older  writer,  gives  of  the 
intercourse  of  Marcion  with  the  Church  of  Rome  (Haer.  42),  the  dealings 
of  Marcion  are  represented  as  being  entirely  with  the  Roman  presbyters  ; 
and  it  may  be  doubted  whether  Epiphanius  found  in  his  authority  the 
solution  which  he  suggests,  that  at  the  time  the  see  was  vacant.  At  the 
very  end  of  the  century,  when  Victor  attempted  to  enforce  uniformity  of 
Easter  observance,  it  was  still  in  the  name  of  his  Church  that  he  wrote, 
asking  that  provincial  councils  should  be  assembled  in  order  to  report  on 
the  matter.  This  is  evidenced  by  the  plural  r?£icti(raTe  in  the  reply  of  Poly- 
crates  (Euseb.  v.  24). 


XXVI.]  THE    EPISTLE   OF   CLEMENT.  573 

was   intended   to  appease   a   sedition  in  the  latter  Church, 
ending  in  the  unwarrantable  deposition  of  some  presbyters 
from  their  office.      The  letter,  which  is  framed  on  the  model 
of  the  Apostolic  Epistles,  is  mainly  taken  up  with  enforcing 
the  duties  of  meekness,  humility,  and  submission  to  lawful 
authority.     The  reception  it  met  with  in  the  Church  to  which 
it  was  addressed  is  evidenced  by  a  letter  written  about  A.D. 
170,  by  Dionysius,  then  bishop  of  Corinth,  to  Soter,  bishop 
of  Rome,  to  acknowledge  a  gift  of  money  which  the  Roman 
Church  had  sent,    exercising  their   '  hereditary  custom '    of 
liberality.      Dionysius  states   that   the    letter  accompanying 
this  gift  had  been  read  at  their  meeting  on  the  Lord's  Day, 
and  would  continue  to  be  so  read  for  their  edification,  as  also 
the  former  letter  of  the  Roman  Church,  written  by  Clement 
(Euseb.  iv.  23).    The  public  reading  of  Clement's  letter  spread 
to  other  Churches  ;  and  Eusebius  (iii.  16)  says  that  he  knew  of 
the  practice  existing  in  very  many  Churches,  both  formerly 
and  in  his  own  time  (see  also  Jerome,  De  Viris  III.  15,  Photius, 
Cod.  113).    With  this  agrees  the  fact  that  it  is  found  (together 
with  a  second  Epistle)  in  the  Alexandrian  MS.  of  the  New 
Testament,    but   coming  as   a  kind   of  appendix  after  the 
Apocalypse.     The  scribe,  however,  has  included  it  among 
New  Testament  books  in  his  table  of  contents ;  and  in  a 
Syriac  version,  to  be  mentioned  presently,  it  is  even  joined  to 
the  Catholic  Epistles.     On  the  other  hand,    in  the  list  of 
Nicephorus  it  is  not  even  placed  with  the  '  antilegomena'  in 
company  with  the  Apocalypse  of  Peter  and  the  Epistle  of 
Barnabas,  but  among  the  'Apocrypha,'  with  the  Acts  of  Peter, 
John,  and  Thomas.      It  seems  to  have  been  scarcely  known 
to  the  Western  Church,  and  there  is  no  evidence  of  any  early 
translation  into  Latin.     The  second-century  attestation  to  the 
Epistle  is  copious.      It  is  clearly  referred  to  by  Hermas  in  a 
passage    which   will  come  under  consideration  in  the  next 
section  ;  it  is  recognized  by  Hegesippus  (Euseb.  iii.  16,  iv.  22), 
who  speaks  of  it  in  connexion  with  his  visit  to  Corinth,  and 
probably  found  it  in  use  there ;   it  is  cited  by  Irenseus  (iii.  3), 
and    several   times    by    Clement   of  Alexandria,    who   once 
(Strom,  iv.  17,  p.  609)  gives  Clement  the  title  of  Apostle,  and 
another  time  (vi.  8,  p.  272)  cites  by  mistake  a  passage  of 


574  NON-CANONICAL   BOOKS.  [XXVI. 

Clement  as  from  the  prophet  Barnabas.  Probably  Clement 
found  the  two  Epistles  of  Clement  and  Barnabas  together,, 
appended  to  his  '  Apostolus/  or  collection  of  Apostolic  letters. 
But  the  impression  made  by  Clement's  revival  of  the  Apostolic 
method  of  teaching  distant  Churches  is  testified  even  more 
strongly  by  the  indirect  evidence  of  the  use  made  of  his 
letter.  It  is  a  matter  of  dispute  whether  certain  coincidences 
in  the  Epistles  of  Ignatius  are  sufficient  to  prove  acquaintance 
with  Clement's  letter,  but  there  can  be  no  doubt  as  to  the 
constant  employment  of  it  in  the  Epistle  of  Polycarp.  The 
beginning  and  ending  of  the  letter  of  the  Church  of  Smyrna, 
relating  the  martyrdom  of  Polycarp,  are  both  fashioned  after 
the  pattern  of  Clement's  Epistle  ;  and  his  form  of  address, 
'  the  Church  sojourning  in  Rome  (-Tra/ooiKovo-a  'PW/AT^V)  to 
the  Church  sojourning  in  Corinth,'  became  an  established 
formula,  which  was  adopted  in  the  letters  of  Dionysius  of 
Corinth  (Euseb.  iv.  23),  and  of  the  Churches  of  Vienne  and 
Lyons  (v.  i).  And  further  evidence  is  furnished  by  the 
legendary  stories,  having  Clement  for  a  leading  personage, 
which  gained  so  much  circulation  by  the  end  of  the  second 
century  or  the  beginning  of  the  third.  There  can  be  no  doubt 
that  it  was  the  celebrity  which  his  widely-circulated  Epistle 
had  given  to  the  name  of  Clement  which  recommended  that 
name  to  the  inventors  of  these  legends. 

The  letter  begins  by  explaining  that  it  would  have  been 
written  earlier  if  it  had  not  been  for  repeated  calamities  in 
which  the  Church  of  Rome  had  been  involved.  It  used  to  be 
supposed  that  the  persecution  under  Nero  was  here  referred 
to,  but  the  best  critics  are  now  agreed  that  all  the  notes  of 
time  in  the  letter  oblige  us  rather  to  refer  it  to  the  reign  of 
Domitian,*  during  which  the  Roman  Church  had  to  suffer  a 
severe  trial  of  persecution.  The  date  would  thus  be  about 
A.D.  96.  This  date  well  agrees  with  the  statement  of  Irenseus 

*  This  date  has  the  authority  of  Eusebius  (iii.  16),  and  apparently  also 
the  earlier  authority  of  Hegesippus.  What  Eusebius  says  is,  that  in" the 
twelfth  year  of  Domitian  Clement  succeeded  to  the  bishopric  of  Rome  ; 
that  he  was  the  author  of  an  admirable  Epistle  still  extant,  written  in  the 
name  of  the  Church  of  Rome  to  the  Church  of  Corinth,  to  appease  a 
sedition  in  the  latter  Church  ;  and  that  Hegesippus  testifies  that  the 
sedition  took  place  in  the  time  of  the  afore -mentioned. 


XXVI.]  THE   EPISTLE   OF   CLEMENT.  575 

(iii.  3),  probably  derived  by  him  from  Hegesippus,  that  the 
Apostles  Peter  and  Paul,  having  founded  the  Church  of 
Rome,  committed  the  government  of  it  to  the  Linus  who  is 
mentioned  in  the  Epistle  to  Timothy  ;  that  to  Linus  succeeded 
Anencletus,  and  to  Anencletus  Clement.  Thus  Clement  is 
separated  by  two  Episcopates  from  the  time  of  the  Apostles. 
This  corresponds  very  well  with  the  interval  between  the 
reigns  of  Nero  and  Domitian,  but  cannot  be  reconciled  with 
the  fiction  which  made  Peter  first  bishop  of  Rome,  and 
Clement  his  immediate  successor.  When  this  fiction  came 
to  be  accepted  as  historical  truth,  it  was  attempted  to  mend 
the  chronology  by  a  theory  that  Linus  only  held  office  as 
Peter's  deputy,  and  dying  during  that  Apostle's  lifetime,  was 
succeeded  by  Clement ;  Anencletus,  who  has  left  no  mark  on 
history,  being  degraded  to  the  third  place.  But  there  is  every 
reason  for  adhering  to  the  account  of  our  oldest  witness, 
Irenseus.  The  names  Linus,  Cletus,  Clement,  have  from  the 
earliest  times  been  commemorated  in  that  order  in  the  Roman 
Liturgy.  What  inducement  could  there  have  been  for  thrust 
ing  the  unknown  name  of  Cletus  before  that  of  Clement, 
unless  it  had  a  chronological  title  to  precedence  ?  If  we 
have  found  reason  to  think  that  Clement  belongs  to  the  reign 
of  Domitian,  we  cannot  attach  much  value  to  a  guess  of 
Origen's  (/#  Johann.  i.  29),  that  he  was  the  same  as  the 
Clement  mentioned  by  Paul  (Phil.  iv.  3).  The  name  is  far 
too  common  a  one  to  allow  of  our  disregarding  the  difficulties 
of  place  and  time  which  stand  in  the  way  of  an  identification. 
In  modern  times  it  has  been  imagined  that  Episcopacy 
had  not  arisen  before  the  end  of  the  first  century,  and  that 
Linus,  Cletus,  Clement,  were  but  the  names  of  leading  pres 
byters.  But  if  so,  we  may  ask,  how  came  it  that  the  letter  of 
the  Roman  Church  should  be  universally  known  as  the  letter 
of  Clement,  whose  name  is  not  once  mentioned  in  it  ?  I  know 
no  good  explanation  of  this  but  the  old  one,  that  this  was 
because  Clement  was  generally  known  to  be  at  the  head  of 
the  Roman  Church  at  the  time  the  letter  was  written.  We 
need  not  suppose,  however,  that  the  name  bishop  was  then 
distinctively  used  to  denote  the  head  of  the  Church,  nor  are 
we  bound  to  think  that  the  line  of  separation  between  him 


576  NON-CANONICAL   BOOKS.  [XXVI. 

and  other  presbyters  was  as  marked  as  it  became  in  later 
times.  The  words  'bishop'  and  'presbyter'  are  used  inter 
changeably  by  Clement,  as  in  Paul's  Pastoral  Epistles.  It 
has  been  thought,  however,  that  although  Clement's  letter  ex 
hibits  the  prominence  of  a  single  person  as  chief  in  the  Church 
of  Rome,  it  affords  evidence  that  there  was  no  such  promi 
nence  in  the  Church  of  Corinth,  whose  bishop  is  not  mentioned 
in  the  Epistle.  But  this  inference  is  not  warranted  ;  for  it  is 
plain  from  the  letter  itself  that  if  Corinth  had  ever  had  a 
bishop,  he  was  out  of  office  at  the  time  the  letter  was  written. 
The  letter  was  occasioned  by  the  deposition  of  certain  'presby 
ters  ; '  and  it  has  been  just  said  that  Clement  would  use  the  name 
*  presbyter'  in  speaking  of  what  we  now  call  the  'bishop.1 
Now,  it  is  to  be  observed  that  the  state  of  things  at  Corinth 
is  not  adequately  described  by  such  phrases  as  '  schism,' 
'  feuds,'  '  dissensions.'  Clement  calls  it  (ch.  i)  an  'abominable 
and  impious  sedition'  (/uapas  /cat  dvoa-iov  aracrecos),  which  he 
compares  (ch.  4)  to  the  sedition  which  Dathan  and  Abiram 
made  against  Moses.*  Accordingly  he  does  not  attempt  to 
heal  the  Corinthian  schism  by  exhortations  to  mutual  con 
cessions  ;  but  he  rebukes  those  whom  he  addresses,  and 
exhorts  them  to  unequivocal  submission  to  the  authority 
which  they  had  resisted.  He  tells  them  of  the  necessity  of 
order  in  things  temporal  and  in  things  spiritual ;  he  tells 
them  that  those  whom  they  had  deposed  held  an  office  insti 
tuted  by,  and  handed  down  from,  the  Apostles  themselves. 
And  he  says  :  '  It  is  shameful,  dearly  beloved  ;  yes,  utterly 
shameful  and  unworthy  of  your  conduct  in  Christ  that  it 
should  be  reported  that  the  very  steadfast  and  ancient  Church 
of  Corinth,  for  the  sake  of  one  or  two  persons,  maketh  sedition 
against  its  presbyters.'  '  Ye,  therefore,  that  laid  the  founda 
tion  of  the  sedition  submit  yourselves  unto  the  presbyters, 
and  receive  chastisement  unto  repentance,  bending  the  kneesf 
of  your  heart.'  The  letter  throws  no  light  on  the  question 

*  I  make  a  suggestion  in  the  next  section  as  to  the  possible  origin  of  the 
sedition. 

f  The  phrase  is  taken  from  the  Prayer  of  Manasses,  and  seems  to  afford 
the  earliest  instance  of  its  use.  This  document,  which  is  included  among 
the  Apocryphal  books  of  the  Authorized  Version,  was  not  admitted  into 


XXVI.]  THE   EPISTLE   OF    CLEMENT.  577 

whether  the  presbyters  deposed  were  all  equal  in  rank,  or 
whether  one  was  superior  to  the  rest. 

It  bears  on  the  question  of  Roman  supremacy  that  we 
should  understand  the  amount  of  disorder  in  Corinth.  If 
there  had  been  merely  a  schism  there,  we  might  wonder 
that  Rome  should  undertake  to  arbitrate  between  rival 
claimants  to  office  in  a  distant  city.  But  if  it  be  under 
stood  that  the  Corinthian  Church  had  distinctly  violated 
what  was  elsewhere  recognized  as  Apostolic  order,  the 
letter  ceases  to  give  evidence  of  Roman  supremacy,  for  the 
enormity  of  the  offence  would  give  to  a  distant  Church 
the  right  of  expostulation.  Clement's  language  :  '  If  certain 
persons  should  be  disobedient  unto  the  words  spoken  by 
Him  through  us,  let  them  understand  that  they  will  entangle 
themselves  in  no  slight  transgression  and  danger  ;  but  we 
shall  be  guiltless  of  this  sin,'  does  not  appear  to  me  to  indi 
cate  any  official  superiority  of  his  Church,  but  only  to  be  such 
as  any  Christian  preacher  might  use  in  rebuking  known  sin. 
No  Church  was  better  entitled  to  use  expostulation  with 
another  than  the  Church  of  Rome,  which  exercised  liberality 
towards  the  rest,  not  only  in  hospitable  treatment  of  the 
strangers  whom  business  was  continually  drawing  to  the 
great  capital,  but  also,  as  we  have  just  seen,  in  direct  gifts 
to  foreign  Churches.  But,  no  doubt,  this  early  example  of 
successful  interference  must  have  done  much  to  increase  the 
prestige  of  the  Church  by  whose  exertions  peace  had  been 
restored. 

In  Clement's  Epistle  such  copious  use  is  made  of  the  Old 
Testament,  that  it  may  be  probably  inferred  that  the  author 
was  a  Jew  by  birth,  familiar  with  the  book  from  childhood. 
In  citing  it  the  ordinary  formulae  of  Scripture  quotation  are 
used  ;  but  the  books  of  the  New  Testament  are  treated 
differently.  Clement  shows  his  acquaintance  with  them  by 
weaving  their  language  into  his  discourse  ;  but  he  does  not 


the  Canon  by  the  Council  of  Trent.  But  there  is  some  evidence  of  early 
Church  use  of  it.  It  is  found  in  the  Alexandrian  MS.,  in  the  collection  of 
hymns  appended  to  the  Psalter.  It  had  been  used  by  Julius  Africanus 
(fr.  40,  Routh,  Rell.  Sac.  ii.  288),  and  it  was  copied  into  the  Apostolic 
Constitutions,  ii.  21. 

2  P 


578  NON-CANONICAL   BOOKS.  [XXVI. 

formally  quote  them  as  authoritative  Scripture,  except  that  he 
uses  in  this  way  sayings  of  our  Lord,  which,  however,  would 
seem  in  his  use  of  them  to  derive  their  authority  from  having 
been  spoken  by  Him,  rather  than  from  the  book  in  which 
they  were  recorded. 

Until  lately  Clement's  Epistle  had  been  only  preserved  in 
one  MS.  (viz.,  as  already  stated,  the  Alexandrian  MS.  of  the 
New  Testament) :  and  there  not  complete,  for  a  leaf  of  this 
part  of  the  MS.  had  been  lost.  But  a  few  years  ago  notice  was 
taken  that  a  manuscript  book  in  a  library  at  Constantinople 
contained,  among  other  early  writings,  a  copy  of  Clement's 
Epistles.  Its  text  was  made  known  to  scholars,  in  1875,  in  an 
admirable  edition  of  Clement,  published  by  Bryennius,  metro 
politan  then  of  Serrae,  now  of  Nicomedia,  a  prelate  whose 
learning  does  honour  to  the  Church  to  which  he  belongs.  And, 
strange  to  say,  almost  about  the  same  time  a  third  authority 
for  the  text  was  recovered  in  a  Syriac  version,  contained  in  a 
Syriac  N.  T.  acquired  by  the  University  of  Cambridge.  In 
this  MS.  Clement's  Epistles  regularly  take  the  place  of  New 
Testament  books,  coming,  as  part  of  the  Catholic  Epistles, 
after  Jude,  and  before  the  Pauline  Epistles,  and  even  furnish 
ing  lessons  for  Church  reading. 

Although  I  professed  to  treat  of  the  Epistle  of  Clement,  I 
have  just  used  the  plural  number,  'Epistles,'  for  our  MS.  autho 
rities  give  us  two  Epistles  ascribed  to  Clement.  Eusebius, 
who  usually  speaks  of  Clement's  Epistle  in  the  singular  num 
ber,  mentions  (iii.  38)  that  there  was  a  second  Epistle  which 
bore  Clement's  name,  but  that  it  had  not  as  much  circulation 
as  the  former,  and  that  it  had  not  been  quoted  by  the  ancients. 
And  internal  evidence  shows  that  the  second,  though  an 
early  document,  is  later,  by  at  least  a  generation,  than 
Clement's  genuine  Epistle.  Indeed,  now  that  we  have  the 
document  complete  (for  the  mutilation  of  the  Alexandrian 
MS.  had  until  lately  deprived  us  of  the  conclusion),  we  learn 
that  it  is  not  an  Epistle  at  all,  but  a  written  homily  intended 
to  be  publicly  read  in  Church.  The  writer  is  distinctly  a 
Gentile,  and  contrasts  himself  and  his  readers  with  the  Jewish 
nation  in  a  manner  unlike  the  genuine  Clement.  And  instead 
of  confining  his  quotations  to  the  Old  Testament,  he  has 


XXVI.]  THE    SHEPHERD   OF   HERMAS.  579 

many  citations  from  the  Gospels,  giving  in  one  place  the 
name  Scripture  to  the  source  of  his  quotation.  He  used 
Apocryphal  Gospels  besides  :  one  of  his  quotations  we  can 
trace  to  the  Gospel  according  to  the  Egyptians.  Yet  he 
appears  to  have  written  before  the  great  conflict  with  Gnos 
ticism  began,  so  that  we  may  confidently  ascribe  the  document 
to  the  first  half  of  the  second  century. 

The  '  Shepherd*  of  Hermas.  —  Returning  now  to  Eusebius's 
list  of  disputed  books,  I  come  to  treat  of  the  '  Shepherd*  of 
Hermas.  The  passage  quoted  from  the  Muratorian  Frag 
ment  (p.  50)  testifies  the  high  consideration  in  which  the 
book  was  then  held.  Although  the  writer  refuses  to  the 
'  Shepherd  '  a  place  in  public  Church  reading,  he  lays  down 
that  it  not  only  might,  but  ought  to  be  read  in  private,  and  his 
language  plainly  indicates  that,  in  some  places  at  least,  the 
Church  use  of  the  book  had  been  such  as  to  cause  danger  of 
its  being  set  on  a  level  with  the  Canonical  Scriptures. 
Irenaeus  (iv.  20)  actually  quotes  a  passage  from  the  book, 
with  the  words  '  Well  said  the  Scripture.'  Clement  of 
Alexandria  quotes  the  book  several  times,  and  to  all  ap 
pearance  fully  accepts  the  reality  and  divine  character  of 
the  revelations  which  it  contains.  Origen,  commenting  on 
Rom.  xvi.  14,  says  :  'I  think  that  this  Hermas  is  the  author  of 
the  book  which  is  called  the  "  Shepherd,"  a  writing  which 
seems  to  me  very  useful,  and,  as  I  think,  divinely  inspired.' 
But  his  references  to  the  book  elsewhere  clearly  indicate  that 
it  did  not  then  stand  on  the  level  of  the  Canonical  Scriptures; 
and  he  several  times  owns  that  it  was  not  received  by  all.* 
In  fact,  the  rise  of  Montanism  made  the  Church  much  more 
cautious  in  the  use  of  non-Canonical  writings.  It  was  felt 
that  the  prerogatives  of  Scripture  were  infringed  on,  when 
the  utterances  of  modern  prophets  were  circulated  as  having 
like  claims  on  the  acceptance  of  Christians.  An  opponent  of 
the  Montanists  (Euseb.  v.  16)  declares  that  he  had  abstained 
from  writing  against  them,  lest  he  should  seem  to  desire  to 
add  anything  to  the  word  of  the  Gospel  of  the  New  Testa 
ment,  to  which  no  one  who  is  resolved  to  walk  according  to 


iv  rif  vir6  nvuiv  Kara^povov^vcf  &if}\icp  T<$  UoifAfvi  (De  Princ.  iv.  II). 
2  P  2 


580  NON-CANONICAL   BOOKS.  [XXVI. 

the  Gospel  can  add  anything,  and  from  which  he  cannot  take 
away.     This  state  of  feeling  led  to  a  severer  scrutiny  of  the 
claims  of  books  which  had  been  admitted  into  public  Church 
use ;  and  it  is  intelligible  why  the  Muratorian  writer  should 
deprecate  the  Church  use  of  a  book  which  he  believed  to  be 
not  more  ancient  than  the  Episcopate  of  Pius.     The  change 
of  feeling  as  to  Hermas  took  place  in  the  lifetime  of  Tertullian. 
In  an  early  treatise  (De  Orationi]  he  disputes  against  certain 
persons  who  thought  themselves  bound  to  sit  down  at  once 
after  prayer,  because  Hennas  is  recorded  to  have  done  so. 
The  book  must  evidently  have  enjoyed  high  authority  when 
its  narrative  statements  could  thus  be  turned  into  rules  of  dis 
cipline.     Tertullian,  in  reply,  says  nothing  to  disparage  the 
authority  of  the  book,  but  only  contends  that  such  an  inference 
from  it  is  not  warranted.     That  the  book  then  existed  in  a 
Latin  translation  maybe  inferred  from  Tertullian' s  describing 
it  by  its  Latin  name,   '  Pastor/  contrary  to  his  practice  in 
speaking  of  books  which  he  knew  only  in  Greek.     In  a  work 
written  several  years  later,  and  after  the  rise  of  Montanism 
(De  Pudic.    10),  Tertullian   contemptuously  repudiates    the 
authority  of  the  '  Shepherd,'  declaring  that  it  was  not  counted 
worthy  of  being  included  in  the  Canon,  but  had  been  placed 
by  every  Council  of  Churches,  even  of  the  Catholic  party, 
among  false  and  apocryphal  writings.*     But  that  the  book 
still   continued   to   enjoy  some   consideration   appears  from 
Tertullian' s  going  on  to  speak  (c.  20)  of  the  Epistle  to  the 
Hebrews  as  more  received  in  the  Churches  than  '  that  apocry 
phal  "  Shepherd  "  of  the  adulterers.'  It  is  worth  while  to  copy 
what  Eusebius  says  of  the  book  (iii.  3)  :  '  It  is  to  be  observed 
that  this  book  has  been  disputed  by  some,  on  whose  account 
it  cannot  be  placed  among  the  homologoumena  ;  but  by  others 
it  has  been  judged  most  necessary  for  those  who  have  especial 
need  of  elementary  instruction.     Hence,  also,  we  know  that 
it  has  been  publicly  read  in  Churches,  and  I  observe  that 


*  *  Si  non  ab  omni  concilio  ecclesiarum  etiam  vestrarum  inter  apocrypha 
et  falsa  judicaretur.'  We  can  infer  from  the  '  vestrarum'  that  the  councils 
which  condemned  the  Shepherd  were  later  than  the  time  of  separation  of 
Tertullian  from  the  Church. 


XXVI.]  THE   SHEPHERD   OF   HERMAS.  581 

some  of  the  most  ancient  writers  have  employed  it.'*  With 
regard  to  what  is  here  said  about  introductory  instruction,  it 
is  to  be  remarked  that  the  feeling  grew  up  that  the  books 
of  Scripture  were  the  property  of  the  Church,  and  therefore 
could  not  so  fitly  be  used  in  teaching  those  who  had  not  yet 
been  admitted  to  it.  And  so  Athanasius  (Ep.  Fest.  39)  classes 
the  '  Shepherd,'  with  the  teaching  of  the  Twelve  Apostles 
and  with  some  of  the  deutero-canonical  books  of  the  Old 
Testament,  as  not  canonical,  but  useful  to  be  employed  in 
catechetical  instruction.!  The  '  Shepherd  '  forms  part  of  the 
appendix  to  the  Sinaitic  MS.  ;  it  is  also  included  in  the  list  of 
the  Codex  Claromontanus,  and  some  twenty  Latin  MSS.  survive 
to  attest  that  it  had  some  circulation  in  the  West. 

The  book,  the  history  of  whose  reception  I  have  sketched, 
consists  of  three  parts.  The  first  part,  called  'Visions,'  relates 
different  revelations  with  which  the  author  had  been  favoured, 
stating  particularly  the  occasion  and  place  of  receiving  each 
vision.  The  scene  of  each  of  these  visions  is  laid  in  Rome  or 
its  neighbourhood,  so  that  the  document  clearly  belongs  to 
the  Roman  Church.  This  part  concludes  with  a  narration  of 
the  vision  which  gives  the  name  to  the  book.  A  man  comes  to 
Hermas  in  the  garb  of  a  shepherd,  and  tells  him  that  he  is  the 
angel  of  repentance,  and  that  he  has  come  to  dwell  with  him, 
being  the  guardian  to  whose  care  he  has  been  intrusted. 
This  '  Shepherd  '  then  gives  him,  for  his  own  instruction  and 
that  of  the  Church,  the  '  Commandments,'  which  form  the 
second,  and  the  'Similitudes,'  which  form  the  third  part  of  the 

*  'iffTfov   us  Kal  TOVTO  irphs  pev  nv&v  avri\f\fKrai,  5i    ot>s  OVK  bv  tv 
6/j.o\oyov/j.ffois  rcOt'n),  u0'  trepav  8e  avayKai6rarov  ols  p.d\iara  5c?  (TTOiXfi<*>~ 
flaayuyiKys  KeKpirai,   oQev  ^7877  Kal  eV  €KK\r)<riais  fcr^ev  aurb  8e5?7,uo- 
Kal    ruv  ira\aiordr(i)v  Se  <rvyypa<pfwv  /ce^pj/xcVovs  Tivas 


f  Having  enumerated  the  books  of  Scripture,  and  declared  these  to  be 
the  only  fountains  of  salvation,  to  which  none  may  add  nor  take  away, 
he  goes  "on  to  add,  'for  greater  accuracy,'  STI  ear*  /col  ere/m 
ov  Kavovi£6/j.€va  n\v,  TervTrayieVa  5e  trapa 
rots  &pTi  Trpofffpxo/j.fvois  Kal  fiov\o/j.(vois 


TV    TTJS  ( 

ical  'lovSld,  Kal  Tcofiias,  Kal  AiSa^T]  Ka\ov/j.fvi]  ru>f  'ATTOCTT^ACOV,  Kal  6 

And  he  proceeds  to  distinguish  the  two  classes  of  books  which  he  has 

enumerated  from   apocryphal  books,   which  are  only   the  invention  of 

heretics. 


582  NON-CANONICAL    BOOKS.  [XXVI. 

work.  With  regard  to  the  general  purport  of  these  revelations, 
it  will  suffice  here  to  state  briefly  that  they  are  intended  to 
rebuke  the  worldliness  with  which  the  Church  had  become 
corrupted  ;  to  predict  a  time  of  great  tribulation  as  at  hand, 
in  which  the  dross  should  be  cleared  away,  and  to  announce 
that  there  was  a  short  intervening  time  during  which  repent 
ance  was  possible,  and  would  be  accepted.  The  question  as 
to  the  possibility  of  forgiveness  of  post-baptismal  gross  sin 
was  then  agitating  the  Church.  The  solution  which  Hermas 
offers  is,  that  during  that  short  respite  the  then  members  of 
the  Church  might  obtain  forgiveness.  But  only  once  :  for 
this  was  an  exceptional  favour,  and  those  who  joined  the 
Church  afterwards  must  expect  no  other  forgiveness  than  that 
which  they  obtained  in  baptism. 

Concerning  the  date  of  the  '  Shepherd,'  received  opinion 
still  accepts  the  statement  of  the  Muratorian  Fragment,  that 
the  author  was  brother  to  Pius,  Bishop  of  Rome,  and  wrote 
during  his  Episcopate  ;  that  is  to  say,  about  the  middle  of  the 
second  century.  I  have  said  (p.  52)  that  I  myself  believe  that 
statement  to  be  erroneous ;  but  before  discussing  this  point, 
it  will  be  convenient  to  say  something  on  some  preliminary 
questions  about  which  there  is  less  room  for  dispute.  If  you 
consider  these  questions  in  order,  you  will  be  able  to  judge 
how  far  you  can  travel  in  my  company.* 

(i)  Did  the  author  wish  his  readers  to  believe  that  he  had 
actually  seen  the  visions,  and  received  the  revelations  which 
he  relates  ?  Donaldson  {Apostolic  Fathers,  p.  326)  thinks  that 
if  Hermas  fancied  he  saw  the  visions  he  must  have  been 
silly,  and  if  he  tried  to  make  other  people  believe  he  had 

*  The  early  date  of  Hermas  was  in  recent  times  first  seriously  maintained 
by  Zahn  (Der  Hirt  des  Hermas,  1868).  Zahn  is  an  authority  whom  it  may 
not  be  safe  always  implicitly  to  follow,  but  who,  at  least,  cannot  be  treated 
with  disrespect.  When  he  came  forward  to  maintain  the  genuineness  of 
the  Ignatian  letters  he  was  regarded  by  many  as  the  advocate  of  a  hopeless 
cause ;  but  Bishop  Lightfoot's  great  work  attests  that  he  has  won  the 
verdict.  I  think  he  would  have  been  more  successful  in  gaining  adherents 
in  the  present  case,  if  the  author  with  whom  he  deals  were  more  generally 
read ;  for  it  appears  to  me  that  many  scholars  simply  hold  fast  to  the  tra 
ditional  opinion  about  a  not  very  interesting  book  which  they  do  not  care 
to  study  for  themselves.  My  own  opinion  was  formed  as  the  result  of 
investigations  commenced  with  a  strong  prepossession  against  the  conclu 
sion  which  I  ultimately  adopted. 


XXVI.]  THE    SHEPHERD   OF   HERMAS.  583 

seen  them,  he  must  have  been  an  impostor.  He  prefers  to 
think  he  was  neither  one  nor  other ;  and  therefore  he  looks 
on  the  book  as  belonging  to  the  same  class  as  Bunyan's 
Pilgrim's  Progress,  in  which  edifying  lessons  are  conveyed 
through  the  medium  of  allegorical  fiction,  which  no  one  is 
supposed  to  take  as  a  record  of  actual  facts.  It  is  to  me 
amazing  that  anyone  with  ordinary  powers  of  literary  per 
ception  could  read  the  book  of  Hermas,  and  doubt  that  the 
author,  impostor  or  not,  intended  his  readers  to  take  him 
seriously.  The  judgment  I  have  quoted  illustrates  what 
I  said  (pp.  328,  329),  that  a  man  incapacitates  himself  for 
historical  criticism,  if  he  so  takes  up  the  modem  attitude  of 
mind  towards  the  supernatural,  as  not  only  to  disbelieve  in  it 
himself,  but  to  be  unable  to  conceive  that  men  in  former 
times  felt  differently.  A  man  might  now  publish  an  edifying 
fiction  in  the  form  of  a  vision,  and  without  taking  any  special 
precaution  feel  sure  that  his  readers  would  not  imagine  he 
wanted  them  to  take  it  as  real.  But  in  the  second  century  a 
writer  was  bound  to  calculate  on  a  different  state  of  feeling  on 
the  part  of  his  readers.  And,  in  point  of  fact,  the  '  Shepherd* 
was  for  a  time  very  generally  accepted  as  a  record  of  real 
revelations.  And  no  critic  of  early  times,  whether  he  accepted 
the  book  or  not,  dreamed  that  its  author  wished  to  convey  any 
other  impression. 

(2)  What,  then,  are  we  to  think  of  what  Hermas,  when 
relating  the  circumstances  of  his  visions,  tells  about  himself 
and  his  family?  If  the  story  be  fiction  and  allegory,  we  have 
no  right  to  suppose  any  of  these  details  to  be  more  real  than 
the  angels  and  towers  which  he  sees  in  his  visions.  Nor  are 
we  even  warranted  in  assuming  that  the  name  Hermas, 
ascribed  to  the  recipient  of  the  revelations,  is  that  of  the 
author  himself.  But  both  the  story  itself,  and  the  manner  of 
telling  it,  prove  that  this  is  no  work  of  fiction.  The  author 
of  such  a  work  would  strive  to  give  some  intelligible  account 
of  the  hero  of  his  narrative ;  but  here  Hermas,  as  if  writing 
to  people  who  knew  him,  gives  no  direct  account  of  himself, 
and  his  story  has  to  be  deduced  by  piecing  together  several 
incidental  notices.  What  we  gather  from  them  is,  that 
Hermas  had  been  brought  to  Rome  as  a  slave ;  that  Rhoda, 


5  84  NON-CANONICAL    BOOKS.  [XXVI. 

the  lady  to  whom  he  had  been  sold,  set  him  free,  and  loaded 
him  with  many  benefits  ;  that  he  had  acquired  some  property, 
and  been  engaged  in  trade,  which  he  owns  he  did  not  always 
carry  on  honestly ;  that  he  married  a  not  very  handsome 
wife,  who  unfortunately  was  not  able  to  govern  her  tongue ; 
that  he  had  other  trouble  with  his  children,  who  in  time  of 
persecution  denied  the  faith,  and  betrayed  their  parents ;  that 
he  thus  lost  house  and  property,  but  remained  steadfast  in  the 
faith,  and  supported  himself  by  agricultural  labour.  Some 
have  imagined  that  the  *  Shepherd '  was  a  romance  written  in 
the  middle  of  the  second  century,  but  intended  to  have  as  its 
hero  the  Hermas  mentioned  a  hundred  years  before  in  the 
Epistle  to  the  Romans.  But  it  is  not  credible  that  the  author 
of  a  romance  would  invent  for  his  hero  such  a  history  as  I 
have  described,  representing  him  not  even  as  a  clergyman 
but  a  layman,  an  elderly  married  man,  with  an  ill-con 
ditioned  wife  and  children.  I  have  dwelt  at  length  upon 
this  point  because  I  am  persuaded  that  the  key  to  all  sound 
criticism  on  the  '  Shepherd '  is  to  understand  thoroughly  that 
the  Hermas  who  tells  the  story  is  no  fictitious  character,  but 
a  real  person,  who  published  his  visions  for  the  edification  of 
his  contemporaries. 

(3)  But  did  he  invent  these  visions,  or  did  he  himself 
believe  in  them  ?  I  have  no  hesitation  in  saying  that  he  did 
believe  in  them.  It  is  not  merely  that  the  whole  book  im 
presses  me  with  belief  in  the  narrator's  good  faith  in  this 
respect;  but  the  stories  themselves,  when  examined,  show 
every  mark  of  being,  not  arbitrary  inventions,  but  attempts 
to  record  the  imaginations  of  a  dream.  I  take,  for  example, 
the  first  vision.  Hermas  relates  that  he  had  one  day  seen 
his  former  mistress,  Rhoda,  bathing  in  the  Tiber,  and  had 
assisted  her  out  of  the  water.  And,  admiring  her  beauty,  he 
thought  what  happiness  it  were  for  him  had  he  a  wife  like 
her  in  form  and  in  disposition.  Further  than  this  his  thought 
did  not  go.  But  soon  after  he  had  a  vision.  He  fell  asleep, 
and  in  his  dream  he  was  for  a  long  time  walking  and  strug 
gling  on  ground  so  rugged  and  broken  that  it  was  impossible 
to  pass.  At  length  he  succeeded  in  crossing  the  water  by 
which  his  path  had  been  washed  away,  and  coming  into 


XXVI.]  THE   SHEPHERD   OF   HERMAS.  585 

smooth  ground,  knelt  down  to  confess  his  sins  to  God.  Then 
the  heavens  were  opened,  and  he  saw  Rhoda  saluting  him 
from  the  sky.  On  asking  her  what  she  did  there,  she  told 
him  that  she  had  been  taken  up  to  accuse  him  before  the 
Lord,  who  was  angry  with  him  for  having  sinned  against  her. 
He  asks  her,  How  ?  Had  he  ever  spoken  a  lewd  word  to  her? 
Had  he  not  always  treated  her  with  honour  and  respect? 
She  owns  it,  but  accuses  him  of  having  entertained  an  evil 
thought,  and  tells  him  of  the  sin  of  evil  thoughts,  and  their 
punishment.  Then  the  heavens  were  closed,  and  he  was  left 
shuddering  with  fear,  not  knowing  how  he  could  escape  the 
judgment  of  God  if  such  a  thought  as  his  were  marked  as  sin. 
Then  he  sees  a  venerable  lady  sitting  in  a  great  white  chair, 
with  a  book  in  her  hands.  She  asks  why  he  who  was  usually 
so  cheerful  is  now  so  sad.  On  his  telling  her,  she  owns  what 
a  sin  any  impure  thought  would  be  in  one  so  singleminded, 
and  so  innocent  as  he ;  but  she  assures  him  it  is  not  for 
this  God  is  angry  with  him,  but  because  of  the  sins  of  his 
children,  whom  he,  through  false  indulgence,  had  allowed  to 
corrupt  themselves  ;  but  to  whom  repentance  was  still  open, 
if  he  would  warn  them.  Then  she  reads  to  him  out  of  her 
book :  of  the  greater  part  he  can  remember  nothing,  save  that 
it  was  severe  and  menacing  ;  but  he  remembers  the  last 
sentence,  which  was  mild  and  consoling.  She  leaves  him 
with  the  words,  *  Play  the  man,  Hermas.' 

Now,  if  we  take  this  story  as  allegorical  fiction,  it  is  im 
possible  to  assign  a  meaning  to  it.  There  is  not  a  word  more 
about  Rhoda  through  the  whole  book.  Why  has  she  been 
introduced  ?  What  is  she  intended  to  represent  ?  Why 
should  Hermas  be  first  told  that  God  was  angry  with  him  on 
one  account,  and  then  be  told  that  it  was  really  on  another 
account  God  was  angry  ?  On  the  other  hand,  the  want  of 
logical  connexion  between  the  parts  of  the  story  is  explained 
at  once  if  we  take  his  own  word  that  it  was  a  dream.  There 
is  no  difficulty  in  believing  that  he  had  seen  Rhoda  as  he 
tells,  and  that  the  thought  he  had  entertained  presented 
itself  to  him  afterwards  in  his  sleep  as  a  sin.  It  is  quite  like 
a  dream  that  Rhoda,  as  principal  figure,  should  fade  out,  and 
be  replaced  by  another ;  that  sensations  of  physical  distress 


586  NON-CANONICAL   BOOKS.  [XXVI. 

in  his  sleep  should  suggest  the  ideas,  first  of  walking  on  and 
on  without  being  able  to  find  an  outlet ;  afterwards  of  mental 
distress  at  words  spoken  to  him  ;  and  altogether  like  a  dream, 
too,  that  he  should  imagine  himself  to  have  heard  a  long  dis 
course,  yet  be  able  to  tell  nothing  of  it  but  the  words  heard 
just  before  awakening.  It  therefore  seems  to  me  quite  false 
criticism  to  put  any  other  interpretation  on  the  story  told  by 
Hermas  than  that  his  '  visions '  commenced  in  the  manner 
he  describes,  by  his  having  what  we  should  call  a  very  vivid 
dream.  He  was  much  impressed  by  it,  and  when,  in  the 
following  year,  he  dreamed  again  of  the  lady  and  her  book, 
he  regarded  it  as  a  divine  communication,  and  set  himself,  by 
fasting  and  prayer,  to  obtain  new  revelations.  As  might  be 
expected,  more  visions  followed,  and  he  made  himself  known 
to  his  Church  as  favoured  with  Divine  revelations.  I  see  no 
reason  for  doubting  the  truth  of  this  story,  though  I  naturally 
think  that  the  visions  of  Hermas  gained  a  good  deal  in 
coherence  when  he  came  to  write  them  down.  I  believe,  also, 
that  the  last  two  sections  of  his  work  contain  records  of  his 
waking  thoughts,  which  he  regarded  as  inspired  by  an  angel 
who,  he  had  persuaded  himself,  had  come  permanently  to 
dwell  with  him.  The  conclusion,  then,  at  which  I  arrive  is, 
that  the  work  of  Hermas  is  not  to  be  classed  with  Bunyan's 
Pilgrim's  Progress,  but  rather  with  the  revelations  of  St.  Teresa, 
St.  Francesca  Romana,  St.  Gertrude,  St.  Catherine  of  Siena, 
and  other  literature  of  the  same  kind,  of  which  there  is  such 
abundance  in  the  Roman  Catholic  Church. 

Are  we,  then,  who  do  not  believe  in  the  revelations  of 
Hermas,  to  set  him  down  as  a  crazy  person,  and  to  regard 
those  who  believed  in  him  as  fools  ?  The  examples  I  have 
just  cited  may  make  us  hesitate  before  coming  to  such  a  con 
clusion.  St.  Teresa,  for  instance,  visionary  as  she  was,  did 
much  useful  work,  and  exhibited  a  large  amount  of  practical 
good  sense.  In  respect  of  sobriety,  the  visions  of  Hermas 
contrast  very  favourably  with  some  of  the  other  literature 
with  which  I  have  compared  them.  I  will  not  discuss  the 
vision  of  Col.  Gardiner,  which  was  accepted  as  real  by  Dr. 
Doddridge,  nor  need  I  remind  you  how  many  persons  who 
can  by  no  means  be  described  as  fools  have  thought  it  worth 


XXVI.]  THE   SHEPHERD   OF   HERMAS.  587 

while  to  record  remarkable  dreams,  under  the  belief  that 
supernatural  intimations  might  thus  have  been  given.  But 
if  you  think  that  the  Church  of  Rome  was  in  the  beginning  of 
the  second  century  too  easy  in  its  reception  of  the  revelations 
of  Hermas,  I  will  ask  you  to  bear  in  mind  that  the  men  of  that 
age  are  not  to  be  scorned  because  their  views  as  to  God's 
manner  of  governing  His  Church  were  different  from  what 
the  experience  of  so  many  following  centuries  has  taught  us. 
We  all  believe  that  in  the  time  of  our  Lord  and  His  Apostles 
a  great  manifestation  of  the  supernatural  was  made  to  the 
world.  How  long,  and  to  what  extent,  similar  manifestations 
would  present  themselves  in  the  ordinary  life  of  the  Church, 
only  experience  could  show.  Again,  if  we  are  able  to  give 
a  natural  explanation  of  some  mental  phenomena  which  were 
once  thought  to  indicate  supernatural  interference,  it  is  no  dis 
grace  to  men  of  early  times  that  they  were  not  acquainted 
with  modern  philosophy.  Even  in  the  Church  of  Rome, 
though  we  may  think  it  gives  credence  too  lightly  to  modern 
miracles,  a  visionary  would  now  receive  from  her  spiritual 
guides  instruction  as  to  the  possibility  of  deception,  and  as  to 
the  need  of  caution,  for  which,  in  the  second  century,  no 
necessity  might  be  felt. 

(4)  I  come,  then,  to  the  question,  Did  Hermas  see  his 
visions  in  the  Episcopate  of  Clement  ?  He  himself  plainly 
intimates  that  he  did.  For  he  states  that  in  his  vision  he 
received  the  following  instructions  : — *  You  shall  write  two 
books,  and  send  one  to  Clement  and  one  to  Grapte.  And 
Grapte  shall  admonish  the  widows  and  orphans,  and  Clement 
shall  send  it  to  foreign  cities,  for  to  him  that  office  has  been 
committed.  And  you  shall  relate  it  to  the  presbyters  of  the 
Church.'  The  natural  inference  from  this  passage  is,  that  at 
the  time  of  the  vision  Grapte  was  what  we  may  describe  as 
chief  deaconess  of  the  Roman  Church,  and  that  Clement  was 
the  organ  by  which  it  communicated  with  foreign  Churches. 
And  we  have  every  reason  to  think  that  he  was  so  described 
on  account  of  the  celebrity  gained  not  long  before  by  his  letter 
sent  to  a  distant  Church.  Different  ways  have  been  devised 
of  escaping  this  inference.  I  really  don't  know  whether  we 
are  to  count  Origen  as  rejecting  the  obvious  meaning  of  the 


588  NON-CANONICAL   BOOKS.  [XXVI. 

passage,  though  he  does  manage  to  find  an  allegory  in  it. 
He  treats  (De  Princip.  iv.  1 1 )  of  three  modes  of  interpreting 
Scripture,  corresponding  to  the  tripartite  nature  of  man — 
body,  soul,  and  spirit.  And  he  imagines  that  he  finds  them 
indicated  in  this  passage,  Grapte,  who  instructs  those  of  lowest 
spiritual  discernment,  being  the  literal  interpretation,  and 
Clement  and  Hermas  himself  representing  the  two  higher 
methods  of  interpretation.  A  solution  more  acceptable  to 
modern  habits  of  thought  is  that  a  real  Clement  is  intended, 
only  not  the  Clement  who  wrote  the  Epistle  to  the  Corinthians. 
But  it  must  be  pronounced  extremely  improbable  that  within 
a  comparatively  few  years  of  the  writing  of  that  letter  there 
should  be  another  Clement,  whose  function  it  also  was  to 
communicate  on  behalf  of  the  Church  of  Rome  with  foreign 
Churches,  but  who  has  left  on  ecclesiastical  history  no  trace 
of  his  existence.*4  A  third  solution  is  that  Hermas,  no  doubt, 
wished  his  readers  to  believe  that  he  saw  his  visions  in  the 
Episcopate  of  the  well-known  Clement ;  but  he  was  telling  a 
lie  :  he  really  wrote  forty  or  fifty  years  later.  But  we  cannot 
adopt  this  solution  unless  we  abandon  the  results  we  have 
already  obtained.  If  the  work  is  a  mere  fiction,  the  imaginary 
hero  may  have  lived  under  Clement,  and  the  real  author 
when  you  please ;  and  his  name  may  or  may  not  have  been 
Hermas.  But  if  he  was  a  man  who  told  his  contemporaries 
of  visions,  real  or  pretended,  which  he  claimed  to  have  seen 
himself,  it  would  be  absurd  of  him  to  destroy  his  chance  of 
being  believed,  by  asserting  that  he  saw  the  vision  at  a  time 
when  it  was  notorious  that  he  had  either  not  been  born,  or 
could  have  been  only  a  child.  It  is  to  be  remembered  that 
the  vision  represents  him  to  have  been  then  an  elderly  married 
man,  with  a  grown-up  family.  I  must  add,  that  Hermas  had 
no  motive  whatever  for  antedating  his  work.  His  prophecy 
announced  tribulation  close  at  hand,  and  only  a  short  inter 
vening  period  for  repentance.  It  would  be  absolutely  con- 


*  On  the  method  of  solving  historical  difficulties  by  imagining  for  real 
characters  duplicates  unknown  to  history,  the  reader  may  consult  S.  R. 
Maitland's  tenth  letter  on  Fox.  If  he  does  not  know  it  already,  he  will 
thank  me  for  the  reference. 


XXVI.]  THE   SHEPHERD    OF   HERMAS.  589 

trary  to  his  interest  to  pretend  that  the  prophecy  had  been 
delivered  forty  or  fifty  years  previously.  All  his  readers 
would  then  know  that  the  prediction  had  failed,  for  nothing 
had  come  of  it.  And  the  promise  of  forgiveness,  which 
excluded  all  those  baptized  after  the  date  of  the  prophecy, 
would  not  be  applicable  at  all  to  the  generation  to  which  the 
book  was  offered.  I  therefore  find  it  impossible  to  resist  the 
evidence  afforded  by  this  passage,  that  Hermas  must  have 
attained  to  middle  life  before  the  death  of  Clement.  I  may 
claim  Bishop  Lightfoot  as  agreeing  with  me  in  this  result ; 
for  he  repeatedly  speaks  of  Hermas  as  a  younger  contemporary 
of  Clement  (Philippians,  p.  167  ;  Clement,  p.  i,  &c.). 

When  this  result  has  been  adopted,  the  main  question  may 
be  regarded  as  settled.  For  the  remaining  point  in  dispute 
concerns  not  the  date  of  Hermas,  but  the  credit  due  to  the 
Muratorian  writer. 

(5)  If  we  admit  that  the  vision  was  seen  in  the  Episcopate 
of  Clement,  can  we  accept  the  Muratorian  statement  that 
Hermas  wrote  the  '  Shepherd '  while  his  brother,  the  Bishop 
Pius,  sat  in  the  chair  of  the  Church  of  the  city  of  Rome  ? 
Lightfoot  thinks  we  can  ;  and  he  suggests  modes  of  reconcile 
ment,  which,  indeed,  I  tried  for  a  long  time  myself  before  I 
could  persuade  myself  to  abandon  the  Muratorian  statement 
altogether.  Hermas  may  have  been  considerably  the  older 
of  the  two  brothers :  perhaps  we  may  give  up  half  the  Mura 
torian  statement,  and  believe  that  he  was  the  brother  of  Pius, 
but  not  that  it  was  during  his  Episcopate  he  wrote  the  '  Shep 
herd  ; '  perhaps  if  we  had  the  Greek  of  the  Muratorian  frag 
ment  we  might  not  find  that  assertion  there.  Then,  again, 
we  have  not  such  certain  knowledge  of  the  dates  of  early 
Roman  Episcopates  as  to  forbid  our  manipulating  them  a 
little.  Could  we  not  screw  up  the  date  of  Pius  somewhat,  and 
screw  down  the  date  of  Clement  ?  Possibly  we  could  bring 
down  the  date  of  the  death  of  Clement  as  late  as  no;  and 
perhaps  we  might  bring  up  the  accession  of  Pius  earlier  than 
139,  which  Lipsius  names  as  the  earliest  admissible  date. 
But  I  abandoned  these  attempts  when  I  saw  that  a  real  recon 
cilement  with  the  Muratorian  writer  was  in  the  nature  of 
things  impossible.  His  object  was  to  prove  Hermas  to  be 


590  NON-CANONICAL   BOOKS.  [XXVI. 

quite  a  modern  personage.     How  could  he  be  that  if  he  had 
attained  the  age  of  forty  before  the  death  of  Clement  ? 

Let  us  inquire,  then,  if  we  are  bound  to  reconcile  ourselves- 
with  this  writer.  Who  was  he  ?  Had  he  any  real  knowledge 
of  the  events  of  the  Episcopate  of  Pius  ?  Critics  confess  them 
selves  unable  to  answer  the  former  question,  and  the  majority 
of  those  who  accept  his  statement  about  Hermas  answer  the 
second  question  in  the  negative.  He  describes  Pius  as 
*  sitting  in  the  chair  of  the  Church  of  the  city  Rome/  and 
evidently  has  no  suspicion  that  the  constitution  of  that 
Church  was  different  in  the  days  of  Pius  and  in  his  own.  But 
in  Hermas  the  honour  of  a  '  chair'  is  not  confined  to  a  single 
person,  and  the  critics  of  whom  I  speak  imagine  that  Epis 
copacy  was  only  then  struggling,  against  much  opposition, 
into  existence.  If  the  Muratorian  writer  knew  nothing  of 
such  a  patent  fact  as  the  constitution  of  the  Church  in  the  days 
of  Pius,  he  cannot  be  an  authority  as  to  the  date  of  publica 
tion  of  a  book  which  must  have  appeared,  if  not  before,  at  the 
very  beginning  of  that  episcopate.  I  have  elsewhere*  given 
my  reasons  for  thinking  that  the  Muratorian  Fragment  is  a 
document  not  earlier  than  the  episcopate  of  Zephyrinus,  that 
is  to  say,  the  beginning  of  the  third  century ;  and  I  will  now 
mention  my  theory  as  to  the  discovery  that  the  author  of  the 
'  Shepherd'  was  brother  of  Pius.  This  discovery  is  found  also 
in  a  note  appended  to  a  very  ancient  catalogue  of  the  bishops 
of  Rome.  Many  good  critics  have  thought  that  the  earlier 
part  of  this  catalogue  was  derived  from  a  list  made  by 
Hippolytus  of  the  bishops  of  Rome  down  to  his  time,  which 
formed  partf  of  his  Chronology.  My  theory,  then,  is  that 

*  Smith's  Diet.  Chr.  Biography,  articles,  MURATORIAN  FRAGMENT, 
MONTANISM. 

t  It  was  with  much  timidity  that,  in  1874,  I  named  Hippolytus  as  pro 
bably  the  author  of  the  work  of  which  the  Muratorian  Fragment  is  a  part ; 
and  hitherto  my  theory  has  found  little  acceptance.  But  I  may  now  count 
Bishop  Lightfoot  as  disposed  to  give  his  adherence.  In  a  letter  to  the 
Academy  (Sept.  21,  1889),  he  makes  the  luminous  suggestion  that  the 
original  of  this  Fragment  was  in  verse,  a  supposition  which  throws  great 
light  on  some  characteristics  of  the  document ;  and  he  justifies  the  sugges 
tion  by  actual  translation  into  Greek  iambics  of  several  passages  of  the 
Fragment.  Now,  among  the  works  of  Hippolytus,  the  titles  of  which  are 
inscribed  on  his  chair,  is  <£5al  €ts  irdffas  ras  ypaipds  ;  and  Lightfoot's  idea  is 
that  we  are  to  understand  by  this,  verses  on  the  Canon  of  O.  T.  and  N.  T. 
Scripture,  of  which  verses  the  Fragment  represents  a  part. 


XXVI.]  THE   SHEPHERD   OF   HERMAS.  591 

Hippolytus,  in  the  course  of  the  investigations  necessary 
for  framing  this  list,  ascertained  that  Bishop  Pius  had  a 
brother  named  Hermas,  and  that  he  then  jumped  to  the 
conclusion  (as  he  was  a  man  quite  capable  of  doing)  that 
this  Hermas  was  the  author  of  the  *  Shepherd.'  Whether 
this  theory  of  mine  be  true  or  not,  I  hold  that  whatever 
conclusions  as  to  the  date  of  the  *  Shepherd '  we  draw 
from  a  study  of  the  document  itself  ought  not  to  be  laid 
aside  in  deference  to  the  authority  of  a  writer  concerning 
whose  means  of  information  we  really  know  nothing.  If  no 
more  be  granted  than  Lightfoot  has  conceded,  the  date  is 
quite  early  in  the  second  century,  and  the  *  Shepherd  * 
therefore  deserves  the  highest  attention  from  the  student 
of  Church  history.  And,  if  it  be  read  without  any  prepos 
session  to  the  contrary,  I  am  persuaded  that  its  contents 
will  be  found  entirely  to  correspond  with  that  early  date, 
since  it  reveals  an  immaturity  of  development  both  in  respect 
of  doctrine  and  of  Church  organization. 

The  length  of  the  discussion  necessary  to  establish  the  date 
of  Hermas  precludes  me  from  treating  of  many  interesting 
questions  raised  by  the  contents  of  the  book  ;  and  I  will  only 
say  something  as  to  what  we  may  gather  from  it  as  to  Church 
organization.  It  has  been  the  bane  of  ecclesiastical  history 
that  so  many  have  studied  it  only  in  the  hope  to  gain  from  it 
some  weapon  which  might  be  used  in  modern  controversies. 
It  is  natural  to  think  that  if  parity  of  presbyters  had  been 
the  Church's  original  rule,  the  government  of  a  single  head 
could  not  have  been  established  without  some  resistance  on 
the  part  of  those  who  were  dispossessed  of  their  equal 
authority.  It  has  been  hoped  to  find  some  exception  to  the 
almost  total  silence  of  Church  history  as  to  such  resistance, 
in  the  language  in  which  Hermas  rebukes  the  strifes  for  pre 
cedence  among  Christians.  I  think  I  am  without  prejudice 
in  this  matter ;  for  I  find  it  much  easier  to  prove  from  Scrip 
ture  that  individual  Christians  are  bound  to  submit  to  the 
established  order  of  the  Church  than  to  prove  that  the  Church 
had  been  bound  to  develop  its  organization  in  one  particular 
way.  And  for  me  it  has  only  a  speculative  interest  to  enquire 
what  was  the  process  by  which  the  Church  arrived  at  the  state 


592  NON-CANONICAL   BOOKS.  [XXVI. 

of  things  that  we  find  when  Church  history  first  comes  into 
clear  light  at  the  end  of  the  second  century,  at  which  time  we 
find  bishops  everywhere,  and  no  memory  that  there  had  ever 
been  any  other  form  of  Church  government.  But  as  far  as  I 
can  see,  the  question  whether  one  presbyter  had  pre-eminence 
over  others  was  one  in  which  Hermas  took  no  interest,  and 
on  which  he  tells  us  nothing.  He  clearly  distinguishes  him 
self  from  the  presbyters,  and  makes  no  claim  to  be  one  of 
their  body.  But  he  has  something  to  tell  us  about  the  '  pro 
phets,'  the  class  to  which,  I  have  no  hesitation  in  saying, 
he  himself  belonged.  The  Church  had  then  its  authorized 
teachers  and  rulers  ;  but  we  learn  from  Mandat.  xi.  that 
there  were,  besides,  '  prophets,'  or  as  we  may  call  them,  lay 
preachers.  Such  a  prophet  was  permitted  to  give  exhor 
tation  in  the  public  meetings  for  worship.*  After  the 
intercessory  prayer  had  been  made,  the  angel  of  the 
prophetic  spirit  would  fill  the  man,  and  he  would  give 
exhortation  to  the  people  as  the  Lord  willed.  It  is  a  mark 
of  the  antiquity  of  our  document  that  it  indicates  that 
'  gifted '  persons  were  still  permitted,  as  in  i  Cor.  xiv.  26, 
to  speak  in  the  Church.  It  can  readily  be  imagined  that 
the  interference  of  the  rulers  of  the  Church  would  sometimes 
be  necessary  to  suppress  indiscreet  or  erroneous  teaching. 
It  strikes  me  as  possible  that  the  rebellion  in  the  Church  of 
Corinth,  where,  even  in  St.  Paul's  time,  spiritual  gifts  had 
been  exercised  without  due  regard  to  order,  may  have 
originated  in  an  unsuccessful  interference  of  authority  with 
some  leading  prophets.  It  was  soon  found  expedient  to 
confine  the  work  of  exhortation  to  the  Church's  authorized 
teachers.  When,  towards  the  end  of  the  second  century,  the 
Montanists  brought  prophesying  again  into  prominence, 
precedents  in  their  favour  were  neither  numerous  nor  then 
very  recent;  and  it  was  found  that  the  inspired  authority 
which  these  prophets  claimed  threatened  to  be  subversive  of 
all  Church  order  and  fixity  of  doctrine.  Hermas  belonged 
to  an  age  when  the  exercise  of  prophetic  gifts  was  not  dis- 

*  In  Hermas,  as  in  St.  James's  Epistle,  the  Christian  community  is  97 
*K<\i)(rla,  the  assembly  for  worship,  77  ffuvaywy-fj. 


XXVI.]  THE   SHEPHERD   OF   HERMAS.  593 

couraged  by  the  Church  authorities ;  but  he  is  distinctly  pre- 
Montanist.  I  have  already  mentioned  how  repugnant  his 
teaching  was  to  the  Montanist  Tertullian.  Hermas  occa 
sionally  gives  indications  of  some  little  jealousy*  of  the 
superior  dignity  of  the  presbyters.  Thus,  in  one  vision,  the 
Church,  who  appears  to  him  in  the  form  of  a  lady,  bids  him 
sit  down.  '  Nay,'  he  modestly  answers,  *  let  the  presbyters 
be  seated  first.'  *  Sit  down,  as  I  bid  you,'  the  lady  replies. 
But  his  chief  anxiety  is  to  guard  the  office  of  prophet  from 
being  intruded  on  by  unworthy  persons.  Some,  it  would 
appear,  claimed  to  be  prophets  in  the  modern  sense  of  the 
word :  persons  would  visit  them,  ask  them  questions  about 
their  private  affairs,  and  pay  money  for  their  advice ;  and 
Hermas  states  that  their  predictions  would  occasionally  turn 
out  right.  But  he  urges  that  the  Spirit  of  God  does  not 
speak  in  answer  to  questions;  that  is  to  say,  when  man 
wishes  Him  to  speak,  but  when  He  Himself  chooses  to 
speak.  These  false  pretenders,  so  ready  to  prophesy  in  a 
corner,  are  dumb  when  they  come  into  the  Church  assembly. 
Their  whole  manner  of  life  must  distinguish  the  true  pro 
phet  from  the  false  :  the  one  is  meek,  humble,  easily 
contented;  not  talkative,  ambitious,  greedy,  luxurious,  like 
the  other. 

The  circulation  which  the  work  of  Hermas  obtained  gives 
us  reason  to  think  that  his  own  claims  as  a  prophet  were 
admitted  by  his  Church,  and  that  the  record  of  his  visions 
was  sent  to  foreign  Churches  as  he  desired.  But  I  can  well 
believe  that  there  had  been  some  hesitation  as  to  recognizing 
him,  and  thus  that  a  little  soreness  of  feeling  on  his  part  may 
have  arisen.  For,  though  a  pious  man,  he  does  not  appear 
to  have  been  a  well-instructed  one ;  and  some  of  his  doctrinal 
teaching,  which  is  not  accurate  when  judged  by  the  standard 
of  our  day,  may  well  have  been  thought  unsatisfactory  by 
the  presbyters  of  his  own.  He  does  not  formally  quote  the 
scriptures  either  of  Old  or  New  Testament ;  nor  does  he 
make  much  use  of  either,  his  coincidences  being  closest  with 
the  Epistle  of  St.  James.  It  is  very  possible  that  he  came 

*  Those  who  take  Hermas  for  a  fictitious  character  are  blind  to  the 
amusing  little  touches  of  human  nature  which  constantly  show  themselves. 

2Q 


594  NON-CANONICAL    BOOKS.  [XXVI. 

from  the  Jewish  section  of  the  Church  ;  but,  in  his  work, 
there  is  not  a  trace,  not  to  say  of  anti-Paulinism,  but  even  of 
Judaism.  In  his  teaching  the  Jewish  nation  has  no  special 
prerogative  ;  and  even  the  '  twelve  tribes '  are  only  the  various 
nations  which  make  up  the  Christian  Church. 

Hernias  and  Theodotion. — Something,  however,  must  be  said 
as  to  the  use  made  by  Hernias  of  one  Old  Testament  passage  ; 
because  it  has  been  imagined  to  afford  an  argument  subver 
sive  of  the  conclusions  I  have  arrived  at  as  to  the  early  date 
of  the  work.  In  the  visions  of  Hermas  (iv.  ii.  4)  he  sees  a 
terrible  wild  beast,  from  which  he  is  delivered  by  the  protec 
tion  of  'the  angel  who  is  over  the  beasts,  whose  name  is 
Thegri.'  This  Thegri,  of  whom  no  one  else  makes  mention, 
had  been  a  puzzle  to  commentators  until  not  long  since,  when 
the  solution  was  obtained  by  Mr.  Rendel  Harris  (Johns  Hop 
kins'  University  Circulars,  iii.  75).  He  compares  the  words  in 
Hermas,  6  /cvptos  aVeo-TCtXcv  TOV  ayyeXov  avrov,  TOV  CTTI  TWV 
OrjpLtov  OVTCL,  ov  TO  6Vo/x,a  ecrrt  ©eypt,  /cat  eye<£pa£ev  TO  o-To/x,a  avrov 
iva  fj,r)  o-e  Xv/xavi;,  with  the  words  of  Daniel  vi.  22,  6  $co's  JJLOV 
a7T€O~T€tXe  TOV  ayyeXoi/  avTOv,  /cat  evec/>/)a£e  TO,  crTOfj-ara  TWV  XedvTcov, 
not  OVK  eXu/i^vavTo  /xe,  when  the  use  of  Daniel  by  Hermas  is 
seen  beyond  mistake.  But,  in  the  original,  the  verb  corre 
sponding  to  evc(£pa£ei/  is  *UD;  and  it  becomes  apparent  that 
we  must  correct  ®eypt  into  Ceypt,  and  understand  '  the  angel 
who  stops  the  mouths  of  the  beasts.' 

This  remark  by  Mr.  Harris  led  to  a  further  remark  by  Dr. 
Hort.  He  pointed  out  (Johns  Hopkins*  University  Circulars, 
iv.  23)  that  the  strong  coincidence  between  Hermas  and  the 
Book  of  Daniel  only  exists  when  Theodotion's  version  of  the 
latter  book  is  used.  The  corresponding  verse  in  the  LXX. 
merely  has  o-eo-w/ce  /xe  6  0eos  oVo  TWI/  XeoWwi/.  In  another  place, 
indeed,  it  has  6  $eos  aTre/cXctcre  Ta  CTTOynaTa  TOOV  XeovTcov  ;  but  it 
neither  has  eve^pa^ev,  nor  does  it  use  the  verb  Xv/xaiVo/xai.  It 
follows  that  Hermas  used,  not  the  LXX.  version  of  Daniel, 
but  that  of  Theodotion ;  and,  therefore,  that  we  must  take  it 
as  a  fixed  point  in  our  discussions  about  the  date  of  Hermas, 
that  he  is  later  than  Theodotion  ;  and  Theodotion  is  com 
monly  believed  to  have  made  his  version  in  the  latter  half  of 
the  second  century. 


XXVI.]  HERMAS   AND   THEODOTION.  595 

Now,  let  me  say  in  the  outset,  that  conclusions  drawn 
from  the  study  of  the  character  of  an  entire  hook  are  not  to 
be  lightly  displaced  by  an  argument  founded  on  a  single 
passage.  Thus,  when  treating  of  the  genuineness  of  i  Thes- 
salonians,  I  did  not  think  it  worth  while  to  discuss  the  inge 
nious  little  argument  which  Holsten  (see  note  p.  396)  founded 
on  ch.  i.  3.  In  the  present  case  we  have  in  our  hands  the  whole 
Book  of  Hernias,  containing  many  notes  of  time  ;  but  we  have 
no  trustworthy  information  as  to  the  date  of  Theodotion's 
version,  and  (what  is  of  more  importance)  we  have  no  suf 
ficient  information  what  other  Greek  versions  there  may  have 
been  antecedent  to  his.  We  are,  therefore,  on  much  firmer 
ground  if  we  use  Hernias  to  throw  light  on  the  history  of 
Greek  translations  of  the  Book  of  Daniel  than  vice  versa. 
Obviously,  we  cannot  infer  from  coincidence  in  a  single  verse 
that  Hernias  was  later  than  Theodotion,  if  it  is  possible  that 
in  that  verse  Theodotion  himself  was  but  following  the  lines 
of  an  older  translator.  And  that  (not  to  mention  Aquila's 
version,  concerning  whose  rendering  of  this  verse  we  have  no 
information)  there  was,  in  point  of  fact,  such  an  older  trans 
lation,  has  been  made  almost  certain  by  investigations,  on 
which  Dr.  Gwynn  at  first  entered  for  my  assistance  in  dealing 
with  the  present  question,  and  which  he  afterwards  carried 
on  on  his  own  account,  and  the  results  of  which  he  has 
published  in  his  articles  SYMMACHUS  and  THEODOTION,  in 
Smith  and  Wace's  Dictionary  of  Christian  Biography. 

One  preliminary  consideration  may  be  mentioned,  which 
may  lead  us  to  suspect  that  there  must  be  some  flaw  in  this 
argument  for  the  later  date  of  Hernias.  The  argument  proves 
a  little  too  much ;  it  proves  that  the  Epistle  to  the  Hebrews 
was  also  written  late  in  the  second  century.  When  the  writer  of 
that  Epistle  uses  the  phrase  (xi.  33),  *  stopped  the  mouths  of 
lions,'  we  can  scarcely  doubt  that  he  had  Dan.  vi.  22  in  his 
mind.  We  may  also  take  it  as  certain  that  he  used  a  Greek, 
not  a  Hebrew,  Bible.  But,  if  it  was  the  Septuagint  version 
of  Daniel  that  he  used,  how  came  he  to  stumble  on  the  word 
fypagav  instead  of  the  aTre/cXeicre  of  the  LXX.  ? 

The  knowledge  which  the  Christian  Church  has  possessed 
of  Greek  translations  of  the  Bible  was  principally,  if  not  ex- 

2Q2 


596  NON-CANONICAL   BOOKS.  [XXVI. 

clusively,  derived  from  Origen's  great  work  the  '  Tetrapla.'  In 
the  first  column  of  that  work  he  published  the  version  of 
Aquila,  noted  for  its  slavish  literalness  and  ruthless  sacrifice 
of  Greek  to  Hebrew  idioms ;  in  the  second  column,  the  ver 
sion  of  Symmachus,  marked  by  greater  purity  of  Greek;  in 
the  third  column,  the  Septuagint ;  in  the  fourth,  the  version  of 
Theodotion,  who  is  said  to  have  been  less  an  independent 
translator  than  a  reviser  of  former  translations.  These  were 
not  the  only  translations  which  had  been  made  before  the 
time  of  Origen  ;  for  he  recovered  and  published  fragments  of 
two  or  three  other  versions  ;  but  these  alone  had  reached  him 
unmutilated.  Of  these  four,  the  Septuagint  alone  is  regarded 
as  pre-Christian.  Aquila's,  which  is  accounted  the  oldest  of 
the  others,  is  said  to  have  been  characterized  by  an  animus 
hostile  to  Christianity,  and  to  have  been  intended  to  deprive 
the  Christians  of  the  use  of  certain  O.  T.  texts  on  which  they 
had  founded  arguments.  The  Septuagint  was  the  Greek 
version  which  was  used  in  the  Christian  Church,  and  was 
regarded  as  inspired  by  many  of  the  Fathers  who  accepted 
a  miraculous  account  of  its  origin.  But  there  was  one  re 
markable  exception,  the  Book  of  Daniel.  St.  Jerome  states 
repeatedly  that  the  Christian  Church  used,  not  the  Septuagint 
translation  of  the  Book  of  Daniel,  but  that  of  Theodotion. 
For  example,  in  the  preface  to  his  translation  of  the  Book  of 
Daniel,  he  says  :  '  Danielem  Prophetam  juxta  LXX.  inter- 
pretes,  Domini  Salvatoris  Ecclesiae  non  legunt,  utentes  Theo- 
dotionis  editione  ;  et  hoc  cur  accident,  nescio.  Sive  quia 
sermo  Chaldaicus  est,  et  quibusdam  proprietatibus  a  nostro 
eloquio  discrepat,  noluerunt  LXX.  interpretes  easdem  linguae 
lineas  in  translatione  servare ;  sive  sub  nomine  eorum  ab  alio, 
nescio  quo,  non  satis  Chaldaeam  linguam  sciente,  editus  est 
liber ;  sive  aliud  quid  causae  extiterit  ignorans,  hoc  unum  affir- 
mare  possum,  quod  multum  a  veritate  discordet  et  recto  ju- 
dicio  repudiatus  sit '  (see  also  the  Preface  to  the  Commentary 
on  the  Book  of  Daniel,  the  Prologue  to  Joshua,  and  Apol.  cont. 
Ruf.  ii.  33).  Thus  it  appears  that  Jerome,  who  was  acquainted 
with  the  Tetrapla  of  Origen,  took  notice  that  the  version  of 
the  Book  of  Daniel  in  use  in  the  Church  of  his  day  was  that 
given  in  the  Tetrapla,  not  in  the  Septuagint  column,  but  in 


XXVI.]  HERMAS   AND   THEODOTION.  597 

the  column  which  presented  the  version  of  Thedotion.  Jerome 
is  a  perfectly  competent  witness  to  this  matter  of  fact,  though 
he  professes  himself  unable  to  offer  any  but  conjectural 
explanations  of  it,  and  though  we  are  unable  to  accept  the 
explanations  which  he  does  give.  It  would  appear  that 
Origen  said  nothing  to  throw  light  on  it;  though  Jerome 
quotes  him  as  having,  at  least  on  one  occasion,  given,  by  his 
example,  his  countenance  to  the  desertion  of  the  Septuagint 
forTheodotion  :  '  Judicio  magistrorum  ecclesiae  editio  eorum 
(LXX.)  in  hoc  volumine  repudiata  est,  et  Theodotionis  vulgo 
legitur;  quae  et  Hebraeo  et  ceteris  translatoribus  congruit, 
unde  et  Origenes  in  nono  Stromatum  volumine  asserit  se  quae 
sequuntur  ab  hoc  loco  in  Propheta  Daniele,  non  juxta  LXX., 
qui  multum  ab  Hebraica  veritate  discordant,  sed  juxta  Theo 
dotionis  editionem  disserere'  (in  Dan.  iv.  5). 

It  is,  accordingly,  Theodotion's  version  of  Daniel  which  is 
ordinarily  found  in  Greek  Bibles  ;  but  the  version  which  stood 
in  the  Septuagint  column  of  Origen's  Tetrapla  has  been 
recovered  from  a  single  MS.,  preserved  in  the  Chigi  Library, 
and  was  printed  at  Rome  in  1772.  It  will  be  found  appended 
to  Tischendorf's  second  and  subsequent  editions  of  the 
Septuagint.  An  extant  Syriac  version,  and  the  citations  of 
Jerome,  fully  establish  its  claim  to  be  Origen's  Septuagint.* 
The  Roman  edition  contains  a  comparison  of  the  variations 
between  the  two  versions,  and  a  comparison  will  also  be  found 
in  the  Appendix  to  Pusey's  Daniel  the  Prophet,  p.  606. 

Now,  to  speak  first  of  the  date  of  Theodotion's  version, 
Epiphanius,  the  earliest  writer  who  gives  a  date,  places  it  so 
late,  that  if  Hermas  used  it,  so  far  from  living  early  in  the 
second  century,  he  could  not  even  have  lived  in  the  Epis 
copate  of  Pius.  In  the  passage  referred  to  (De  Menss.  et 
Pondd.,  17),  which  treats  of  Greek  translations  of  the  Bible, 
whatever  may  have  been  the  errors  for  which  Epiphanius  is 
himself  responsible,  they  have  been  so  largely  added  to  by 
his  transcribers,  that  his  Greek  text,  as  printed  by  Petavius, 
exhibits  a  really  stupendous  mass  of  blunders.  Dr.  Gwynn, 

*  The  claim  is  made  in  the  subscription :  Acm^A.  Kara  rovs  6.  eypa<prj  e£ 

e/c  r 


NON-CANONICAL    BOOKS.  [XXVI. 

however,  found  on  consulting,  at  the  British  Museum,  a 
Syriac  translation,  bearing  date  before  A.D.  660,*  that  the 
worst  of  these  blunders  can  be  cleared  away  ;  and  of  those 
that  remain  we  may  charitably  believe  that  some  had  arisen 
through  negligence  of  transcribers  before  the  Syriac  transla 
tion  was  made.  It  turns  out  that  Epiphanius  means  to  say 
that  the  translation  of  Symmachus  was  made  in  the  reign  of 
Marcus  Aurelius  ;  and  that  the  translation  of  Theodotion  was 
made  in  the  following  reign,  that  of  Commodus.f 

Epiphanius,  however,  is  a  writer  whose  unsupported  state 
ments  must  be  received  with  great  caution  (see  p.  168).  I 
need  not  inquire  how  many  of  his  blunders  arose  from  erro 
neous  information,  how  many  from  a  habit  of  supplying  by  in 
vention  the  defects  of  his  information.  In  the  present  case,  he 
is  peculiarly  untrustworthy,  being,  on  several  points,  contra 
dicted  by  older  and  better  authorities.  He  makes  Symmachus 
an  apostate  from  Samaritanism  to  Judaism  ;  whereas  he  really 
was  an  Ebionite,  as  we  learn  from  Eusebius  (vi.  17),  who  had 
met  with  a  work  of  his  in  defence  of  that  heresy.  Again,  he 
tells  that  Theodotion  was  a  native  of  Pontus,  and  had  been  a 
disciple  of  Marcion  until  he  became  a  proselyte  to  Judaism, 
when  he  learned  the  Hebrew  language.  But  we  learn  from 
Irenseus  that  Theodotion  was  really  an  Ephesian  ;  and  we  can 
have  little  doubt  that  Epiphanius  has  mixed  up  Theodotion 
with  another  translator  of  the  Old  Testament,  Aquila,  who 
was  a  native  of  Pontus,  and  of  whom  also  the  story  is  told 
that  he  had  been  a  Christian  before  he  became  a  proselyte  to 
Judaism.  And  it  would  seem  to  be  for  no  better  reason  than 
because  he  has  placed  Theodotion  at  Pontus,  that  Epiphanius 
makes  him  a  disciple  of  the  great  Pontic  heresiarch,  Marcion. 
With  respect  to  his  dates,  he  has  certainly  placed  Theodotion 
too  late  in  naming  the  reign  of  Commodus  (180-192).  For 
Irenseus,  who  wrote  in  the  beginning  of  that  reign,  speaks 
(iii.  21 )  of  the  versions  of  Aquila  and  Theodotion,  and  as  we 

*  This  translation  has  been  published  by  De  Lagarde,  Vet.  Test,  ab 
Origene  recensiti  fragmenta  apud  Syros  servataquinque,  Gottingen,  1880. 

t  Accordingly,  the  Paschal  Chronicle,  following  Epiphanius,  places  the 
publication  of  Theodotion's  version  in  the  consulship  of  Marcellus  and 
^Elianus,  that  is,  in  the  year  184. 


XXVI.]  HERMAS   AND   THEODOTION.  599 

saall  presently  see,  his  use  of  the  latter  translation  is  such  as 
to  show  that  it  could  not  then  have  been  recent.  On  the 
otter  hand,  Epiphanius  has  placed  Symmachus  too  early ; 
for  Irenaeus  does  not  mention  him  ;  and  so  it  is  probable  that 
he,  and  not  Theodotion,  was  the  latest  of  the  three  translators 
just  lamed.  Symmachus  was  but  an  older  contemporary  of 
Origin,  both  having  had  personal  acquaintance  with  the 
same  lady,  Juliana  (Euseb.,  as  above).  Epiphanius  appears  to 
have  jumped  to  the  conclusion  that  Symmachus  was  antece 
dent  to  Theodotion,  from  the  fact  that,  in  Origen's  columns, 
the  versions  stood  in  the  order,  Aquila,  Symmachus,  LXX., 
TheodDtion,  which  Origen  certainly  did  not  intend  as  a 
chronological  arrangement.  We  must,  therefore,  dismiss 
Epiphanius's  whole  account  of  Greek  translations,  as  being 
absolutely  without  historical  value.  It  may  not  be  all  pure 
invention  ;  but  we  have  no  means  of  disentangling  the  grains 
of  truth  it  may  possibly  contain.  When  we  have  rejected  the 
testimony  of  Epiphanius,  we  are  left  without  any  precise 
information  as  to  the  date  of  Theodotion  ;  but  I  have  no  wish 
to  dispute  the  common  opinion  that  he  lived  in  the  second 
century,  because  the  question  with  which  we  are  really  con 
cerned  is  whether  he  did  more  than  revise  a  previous  trans 
lation  different  from  the  Chigi  Septuagint. 

Though  it  is  only  within  very  wide  limits  we  can  tell  when 
Theodotion  lived,  we  can  assign  a  later  limit  to  the  time  when 
his  version  of  the  Book  of  Daniel  came  into  use  in  the  Chris 
tian  Church.  Its  use  was  not  due,  as  some  supposed,  to 
the  influence  of  Origen,  but  is  to  be  found  in  the  previous 
century.  Overbeck  has  carefully  examined  (Qucest.  Hippol. 
Specimen,  p.  105)  the  quotations  from  Daniel  made  by  Irenaeus 
in  his  great  work  on  heresies,  with  the  result  of  finding  that 
Irenaeus  habitually  uses  the  version  of  Theodotion,  not  that 
of  the  LXX.  Since  we  know  the  greater  part  of  Irenaeus 
only  through  the  medium  of  a  Latin  translation,  it  might  be 
objected  that  the  quotations  only  inform  us  as  to  the  version 
in  use  in  the  time  of  the  translator,  and  not  as  to  that  used  by 
Irenaeus  himself.  Overbeck,  therefore,  has  pointed  out  three 
passages  in  particular  where  the  argument  of  Irenaeus  turns 
on  words  peculiar  to  Theodotion's  version.  These  are  the 


600  NON-CANONICAL    BOOKS.  [XXVI. 

quotations  of  Dan.  xii.  7,  in  iv.  xxvi.  I  ;  of  Dan.  ii.  44,  in  v. 
xx.  i,  and  v.  xxvi.  2.  In  a  citation  of  Dan.  xii.  9,  10,  which 
Irenaeus  (i.  xvi.)  reports  as  made  by  the  Marcosians,  there  is 
a  conflation  of  the  two  versions.  In  accepting  Overbeck's 
result,  we  must  guard  ourselves  by  leaving  the  possibility 
open  that  what  Irenaeus  used  was  not  Theodotion's  trans 
lation,  but  an  older  version  closely  followed  by  Theodo:ion. 
And  when  we  speak  of  a  '  conflation,'  we  must  always  bear 
in  mind  the  possibility  that  the  so-called  conflation  may  in 
truth  be  the  earliest  document,  which  may  have  been  partially 
followed  by  two  independent  subsequent  writers. 

Overbeck  has  also  studied  the  citations  in  the  workcf  Hip- 
polytus  on  Antichrist,  and  finds,  as  might  be  expected  from 
the  fact  that  Hippolytus  was  a  hearer  of  Irenaeus,  that  le  also 
used  the  version  of  Theodotion.  This  result  is  confirmed  by 
Bardenhewer's  study  of  the  remains  of  the  work  of  Hippolytus 
on  Daniel,  his  report  being  that  Hippolytus  not  only  used  the 
version  of  Theodotion,  but  seems  ignorant  of  any  other,  and 
that  his  interpretation  sometimes  directly  contradicts  the 
Septuagint  version.  Overbeck  arrives  further  at  the  conclu 
sion  that  Clement  of  Alexandria  used  Theodotion's  version 
(see  the  passages  from  Dan.  ix.,  quoted  by  Clement,  that 
are  given  by  Archbishop  Ussher  in  his  Syntagma  de  LXX. 
interprett.  Versione). 

On  the  other  hand,  Justin  Martyr  (Trypho  31)  gives  a  long 
quotation  from  Dan.  vii.,  in  which  the  agreements  with  the 
Chigi  version  are  so  numerous  as  to  preclude  the  explana 
tion  that  they  result  from  casual  coincidence ;  and  I  myself 
hastily  concluded  at  first  that  Justin  used  no  other  version. 
But  a  more  careful  examination  shows  that  Justin's  text  ex 
hibits  also  a  number  of  divergences  from  the  Chigi  version, 
and  that  in  many,  though  not  in  all,  of  these  it  agrees  with 
Theodotion's.  This  was  observed  by  Wetstein  (Prolegg.  in 
N.  T.,  p.  64,  edit.  1730),  who,  anticipating  Dr.  Hort  in  the 
use  of  the  principle  that  coincidence  with  Theodotion  proves 
a  writer  to  be  later  than  Theodotion,  drew  the  inference  that 
the  Trypho  could  not  be  the  work  of  Justin.  Stroth  (ap. 
Eichhorn,  Repert.  ii.  75),  accepting  the  same  principle,  in 
ferred  that  Theodotion  must  have  been  earlier  than  Justin. 


XXVI.]  HERMAS   AND   THEODOTION.  6oi 

But  Credner  (Beitrdge,  ii.  261-272)  gave  what  I  take  to  be 
the  true  explanation,  viz.  that  there  must  have  been  an  older 
translation  of  which  both  Justin  and  Theodotion  made  use. 

The  citations  by  Tertullian  prove  that  the  so-called  LXX. 
version  was  accepted  as  such  in  Africa  at  the  time  that  the 
early  Latin  translation  there  used  was  made.  In  one  work, 
ascribed  to  Tertullian,  the  treatise  Adv.  Judceos,  Theodotion's 
version  is  used.  A  single  example  will  suffice  as  illustration. 
The  words  (Dan.  x.  n)  translated  in  our  version,  '  O  Daniel, 
a  man  greatly  beloved,'  are  rendered  in  the  LXX.  AavtrJX, 
av@p(D7ros  eXeetvos  et;  but  by  Theodotion,  dvr)/3  e7ri$v/xta>v.  Now 
in  De  Jejun.  9,  the  passage  is  quoted  in  the  form,  '  Daniel, 
homo  es  miserabilis  ;'  but  in  Adv.  Judceos  9,  '  Vir  deside- 
riorum  tu  es.'  The  difference  here  pointed  out  goes  to 
confirm  Meander's  suspicions  that  the  section  in  which  these 
citations  occur  is  not  genuine.-"  But  the  treatise  against  the 
Jews,  if  written  by  Tertullian,  must  have  been  one  of  his 
latest  works,  and  full  forty  years  later  than  the  treatise  of 
Irenaeus.  It  might  seem  more  likely  than  not  that  in  that 
interval  of  time  Theodotion's  Daniel,  which  was  habitually 
used  by  Irenaeus,  would  have  been  made  by  translation 
accessible  to  Latin-speaking  Christians.  Cyprian  shows 
acquaintance  with  both  versions,  using,  for  instance,  the  LXX. 
form  of  Dan.  ii.  35,  Test.  ii.  17  ;  but  ordinarily  Theodotion  : 
see,  for  example,  Dan.  xii.  4,  in  Test.  i.  4. 

In  view  of  the  facts  which  have  been  stated,   I  find   it 

*  Neander's  main  ground  for  suspicion  (Antignosticus ;  ii.  530,  Bohn)  is 
that  the  treatise  against  the  Jews  has  several  passages  in  common  with  the 
third  book  against  Marcion,  which  cohere  with  the  context  in  the  latter 
work,  not  in  the  former.  It  is  clear,  therefore,  that  the  author  of  the 
former  treatise  borrowed  these  passages  ;  but  I  hesitate  to  say  that  we  can 
thence  infer  he  was  not  Tertullian  ;  for  it  is  common  with  voluminous 
writers  to  save  themselves  trouble  by  turning  to  new  account  what  they 
had  written  on  a  former  occasion.  I  have  myself  pointed  out  (Hermathena, 
i.  103)  that  the  use  made  (chap.  8)  of  the  chronology  of  Hippolytus  proves 
that  the  treatise  against  the  Jews  cannot  be  much  earlier  than  A.D.  230,  a 
time  however  when,  there  is  reason  to  believe,  Tertullian  was  still  in  literary 
activity. 

Noeldechen,  in  his  chronological  arrangement  of  the  writings  of  Tertul 
lian  (Harnack,  Texte  und  Untersuchungen,  v.  2)  places  the  treatise  against 
the  Jews  quite  early  among  the  works  of  Tertullian  (viz.  about  A.D.  195) ; 
but  his  reasons  seem  to  me  quite  outweighed  by  those  here  given. 


602  NON-CANONICAL    BOOKS.  [XXVI. 

impossible  to  accept  the  received  opinion,  founded  on  the 
authority  of  the  passage  in  Jerome  already  quoted,  that  the 
Christian  Churches  up  to  the  middle  of  the  second  century 
used  the  LXX.  version  of  the  Book  of  Daniel,  and  afterwards 
rejected  it  and  replaced  it  by  Theodotion's.  St. Jerome,  it  will 
be  observed,  does  not  profess  to  have  any  historical  tradition 
of  such  a  rejection,  but  merely  attests  the  fact  that  in  his  time 
Theodotion's  version  was  in  universal  use.  But  when  could 
such  a  rejection  have  taken  place,  and  how  could  it  take  place 
both  universally  and  silently?  It  must  have  taken  place  before 
the  time  of  Irenaeus,  who,  as  we  have  said,  used  a  version 
substantially  the  same  as  Theodotion's.  I  have  rejected  Epi- 
phanius's  statement  that Theodotion  and  Irenseus  both  worked 
in  the  same  emperor's  short  reign  ;  but  unless  current  opinion 
as  to  the  date  of  Theodotion's  version  be  widely  mistaken,  it 
must  have  been  quite  a  modern  one  in  the  days  of  Irenaeus. 
And  it  was  the  work  not  of  a  Christian,  but  of  a  Jewish  prose 
lyte.  Now  Irenaeus  (in.  xxi.)  believed  in  the  divine  inspiration 
of  the  seventy  interpreters  ;  and  in  the  chapter  to  which  I  refer 
his  object  is  to  establish  that,  in  comparison  with  their  work, 
the  versions  of  Aquila  and  Theodotion  have  no  authority 
deserving  of  regard.  Is  it  then  credible  that  he  should,  with 
out  a  word  of  explanation,  sweep  away  an  entire  book  of  the 
Bible  of  these  venerated  translators,  and  replace  it  by  the 
work  of  an  enemy  of  the  Church  ?  Is  it  not  strange,  too,  that  the 
upstart  version  should  meet  as  much  acceptance  in  Alexandria 
as  in  Gaul  ?  And,  again,  is  it  not  strange  that  it  should  be 
Theodotion,  who  of  all  the  ancient  interpreters  followed  most 
closely  the  lines  of  the  LXX.,  and  is  supposed  to  have  been 
least  acquainted  with  Hebrew  or  Chaldee,  who  should  have 
cast  the  LXX.  completely  aside,  and  made  a  totally  indepen 
dent  translation  ?  I  am  therefore  disposed  to  believe  not  only 
that  Theodotion  followed  the  lines  of  an  older  version,*  and 
that  this  was  the  one  used  by  Irenaeus  ;  but  also  that  this 

*  Dr.  Gwynn  has  noted  a  verse  (x.  6)  in  the  LXX.  Daniel,  which  affords 
ground  for  a  suspicion  that  it  was  based  on  a  former  version,  in  points  at 
least  approaching  to  Theodotion's.  There  is  nothing  in  the  Hebrew  cor 
responding  to  rb  ffr6nj.a  avrov  oxrel  QaXaffff-qs ',  but  this  rendering  might  be 
accounted  for  as  an  editorial  re-writing  of  rb  a<a/j.a  avrov  oxrel  Odpffis,  a  literal 
rendering  of  the  Hebrew  preserved  by  Theodotion.  The  rendering  of 


XXVI.]  HERMAS   AND   THEODOTION.  603 

older  version  was  what  Irenaeus  recognized  as  the  Septua- 
gint.  In  fact,  our  common  use  of  the  phrase  '  the  Septuagint' 
attributes  to  that  work  greater  unity  than  it  really  possesses. 
Critics  are  now  agreed  that  the  different  books  included 
in  it  were  not  all  translated  by  the  same  hands  or  at  the 
same  time  ;  so  that  it  is  really  not  a  single  version,  but  a 
collection  of  different  versions.  If  a  purchaser  now  asks  for 
a  copy  of  the  Septuagint,  the  book  that  goes  by  that  name, 
which  the  bookseller  will  offer  him,  will  contain,  not  the 
Chigi  version  of  Daniel,  but  Theodotion's  version.  May  it 
not  be  the  case  that  Irenaeus  and  Clement  had  no  intention 
of  superseding  the  Septuagint,  but  only  that  the  collection  to 
which  they  gave  the  name  of  Septuagint,  instead  of  the  Chigi 
Daniel  (which  was  accepted  as  part  of  the  Septuagint  in 
Palestine,  where  Justin  Martyr  lived  and  where  Origen  made 
his  Hexapla),  contained  a  different  version;  probably  not 
Theodotion's,  but  the  version  which  was  the  basis  of  Theo 
dotion's  revision  ?  If  this  older  version  was  in  substantial 
agreement  with  Theodotion's,  the  substitution  of  the  latter 
version  in  Church  use  might  easily  take  place  silently. 

At  all  events,  an  examination  of  the  Chigi  Daniel  will 
make  it  appear  intensely  improbable  that  this  could  have 
been  the  only  version  through  which  the  Book  of  Daniel  was 
known  to  Greek-speaking  Jews  until  the  second  century  after 
Christ.  For  this  version  is  not  so  much  a  translation  as  a 
free  reproduction  of  its  original,  bearing  to  Theodotion's 
version  the  same  relation  that  the  Apocryphal  First  Book  of 
Esdras  bears  to  the  corresponding  portions  of  the  Canonical 
Scriptures.  Dr.  Gwynn's  conjecture  seems  to  me  well  worthy 
of  consideration,  that  the  Apocryphal  Esdras  and  the  Chigi 
Daniel  may  have  had  the  same  author.  There  is  one  remark 
able  coincidence  between  them  :  aTn/peio-aro  avra  ei/  TO>  etSwXetw 
avrov  (i  Esdras  ii.  10  ;  Dan.  i.  2).  And  the  two  works  re 
semble  each  other,  not  merely  in  continual  arbitrary  changes 

Tharshish  by  6d\a(r<ra,  though  quite  exceptional  in  the  LXX.,  is  found  once 
Is.  ii.  16,  and  has  rabbinical  authority  :  see  also  Jerome's  Commentary 
in  loc. ;  but  it  seems  impossible  to  account  for  ffr6/j.a,  except  as  a  corrup 
tion  of  trw^a.  Dr.  Gwynn  observes  also  that  the  mistranslation  ffirav urtu 
for  '  seal'  (Dan.  ix.  24)  can  scarcely  be  accounted  for  except  as  a  corruption 
of  the  fftypayiffai  preserved  by  Theodotion. 


604  NON-CANONICAL   BOOKS.  |_XXVI. 

from  the  original,  but  in  both  containing  ornamental  addi 
tions.  As  the  Greek  Daniel  adds  to  the  Chaldee  the  stories 
of  Susanna  and  of  Bel  and  the  Dragon,  so  the  Greek  Esdras 
adds  the  story  of  the  three  young  men  at  the  Court  of  King 
Darius.  The  latter  even  contains  a  hymn  after  the  pattern  of 
the  'Song  of  the  Three  Children,'  though  on  a  much  smaller 
scale.  And,  though  the  Book  of  Esdras  had  not  the  good 
fortune  to  be  admitted  into  the  Canon  of  the  Council  of  Trent, 
no  part  of  the  deutero-canonical  books  has  received  more 
extensive  Patristic  recognition  than  the  story  just  cited.  The 
Apocryphal  Esdras  may  very  possibly  be  an  older  translation 
than  the  Canonical  Ezra ;  for  the  latter  is  a  separate  book 
from  that  of  Chronicles  ;  but  to  all  appearance  they  had 
formed  one  book  when  the  translation  of  the  Apocryphal 
Book  was  made  ;  and  that  this  was  the  original  form  of  the 
Hebrew  may  be  gathered  from  the  identity  of  the  last  verse 
of  Chronicles  with  the  first  verse  of  Ezra.  This  difference  of 
form  of  the  two  Greek  books  prevented  them  from  being 
taken  as  different  translations  of  the  same  book  ;  and  so  both 
passed  as  distinct  books  into  the  Greek  Bible  under  the 
names  of  First  and  Second  Esdras.  But,  if  the  range  of 
contents  of  the  two  books  had  been  the  same,  it  might  well 
have  happened  that  the  Apocryphal  Esdras  might  have  been 
placed  by  Origen  in  his  Septuagint  column,  and  the  Canoni 
cal  Esdras  in  the  Theodotion  column  ;  and  then  we  should 
have  a  parallel  to  what  has  happened  in  the  case  of  the  two 
versions  of  Daniel. 

I  have  just  said  that  it  is  more  probable  than  not  that,  long 
before  the  second  century  after  Christ,  the  Chisian  version 
should  have  had  to  encounter  the  rivalry  of  a  more  faithful 
translation;  and  it  might  perhaps  be  supposed  that  the  facts 
already  brought  forward  could  be  explained  by  pushing  back 
the  date  of  Theodotion's  translation  to  the  early  part  of  the 
second  century.  But  a  table,  drawn  up  by  Dr.  Gwynn,  of  the 
New  Testament  citations  of  Daniel  with  the  corresponding 
renderings  in  Theodotion,  and  in  the  so-called  Septuagint, 
proves  decisively  the  existence  of  a  version  different  from  the 
Chisian,  at  an  earlier  date  than  it  is  possible  to  imagine 
Theodotion  to  have  lived.  Instead  of  this  table  exhibiting 


XXVI.  ]  HERMAS   AND   THEODOTION.  605 

an  exclusive  use  of  the  Chisian  version,  it  is  really  surprising 
how  little  evidence  it  affords  that  that  version  was  even 
known  to  the  N.  T.  writers,  though  it  must  certainly  have 
been  in  existence  long  before  their  time.  I  have  already 
referred  to  the  Epistle  to  the  Hebrews.  The  Apocalypse  is 
the  N.  T.  book  which  makes  most  use  of  the  Book  of  Daniel. 
In  that  book  the  result  of  the  comparison  is,  that  there  are 
several  passages  in  which  St.  John  does  not  use  the  LXX.,  and 
does  approach  nearer  to  Theodotion  ;  and  that  there  is  no 
thing  decisive  the  other  way.  So  that  I  actually  find  in  the 
Apocalypse  no  clear  evidence  that  St.  John  had  ever  seen  the 
so-called  LXX.  version.  The  following  are  some  of  the  pas 
sages  in  question  :  — 

(1)  Rev   ix.  \2O  :   TO.   €tSo>Xa  TO,  xpvcra.  /cat  TO,  apyvpa   /cat  TO. 
^aX/co,  /cat  TO.  Xt$tva  /cat  TO.  £vXtva  a  ovVe  /^XeTretv  Swavrat  OVTC 
d/covetv  ovre  TTf.pnra.Ttiv.     There  is  not  a  word  of  this  in  the 
LXX.  ;  but  Theodotion  has,  Dan.  v.  23,  TOVS  0eovs  TOVS  ^pvo-ovs 
/cat  apyvpovs  /cat  ^O.\KOV?  /cat  o-tSvypovs  /cat  £vXtVovs  /cat  Xt$tVovs,  ot 
ov  ySXcTrovcrt  /cat  ot  ov/c  d/couowt. 

(2)  Rev.  x.  5  :  a>/xoo-ev  ev  T<£  £OJVTI.    So  Theod.  (Dan.xii.  7); 
but  LXX.,  w/xocre  TOV  £covra. 

(3)  Rev.  xii.  7  :  Mt^a^X  .  .  .  TOV  TroXe/^o-at.     Theod.  has 
also  TOV  TroXe/x^crat  (Dan.  X.  20)  ;  but  LXX.,  Stajaa^eo-^at  without 


(4)  Rev.  xiii.  7  :  TroXe/x-ov  /xcTa  Toil/  dytW.     So  Theod.  (Dan. 
vii.  21)  ;  but  LXX.,  Trpos  TOVS  dytovs. 

(5)  Rev.  xix.  6  :   <£o>v7)  o^Xov.     So  Theod.  (Dan.  x.  6)  ;  but 

LXX.,  <£COVT)  Oopvftov. 

(6)  Rev.  xx.  4,  and  Dan.  vii.  9.     Apoc.  and  Theod.  have 

/cpt/xa  :  LXX.,  /courts. 

(7)  Rev.  XX.  1  1  :  TO'TTOS  OVK  evpe^r;  avVot?.      So  Theod.  (Dan. 
ii.  35)  ;  but  LXX.,  WO-TC  /xiySev  KaTaXet^^vat  e^  avTcov. 

If  the  first  or  the  last  of  these  examples  had  been  found  in 
Hermas,  instead  of  in  the  Apocalypse,  it  would  certainly  have 
been  regarded  as  affording  positive  proof  that  Hermas  used 
Theodotion.  In  the  present  case  it  may  be  said  that  St.  John 
was  not  under  the  necessity  of  using  any  version,  and  could 
have  translated  for  himself  from  the  Chaldee.  And  so,  no 
doubt,  he  could.  And  yet,  I  think  nothing  but  a  strong 


606  NON-CANONICAL   BOOKS.  [XXVI. 

preconceived  opinion  that  St.  John  could  have  used  no 
other  version  than  the  Chisian  would  prevent  the  conclusion 
from  being  drawn  that  he  actually  does  use  a  different 
version.  The  author  of  the  Apocalypse  did  not  write  Greek 
with  such  facility  that  he  should  scorn  to  use  the  help  of 
a  Greek  translation  ;  and  in  fact,  in  the  case  of  other  books 
of  Scripture,  he  shows  himself  acquainted  with  the  Greek 
Bible. 

If  no  other  version  than  the  Chisian  was  accessible  to 
St.  John,  we  need  not  be  surprised  at  his  rejecting  it  and 
preferring  to  render  for  himself,  because  such  a  course  would 
certainly  be  adopted  by  any  Jew  who  was  able  to  read  the 
original,  and  who  at  all  valued  faithfulness  of  translation.  But 
is  it  intrinsically  probable  that  for  centuries  every  Jew  com 
petent  to  ascertain  the  fact  kept  to  himself  his  knowledge 
of  the  unfaithfulness  of  the  current  version  ;  and  that  none 
had  the  charity  to  make  a  better  version  for  the  use  of  his 
Greek-speaking  brethren  ?  On  the  other  hand,  is  it  very 
improbable  that  such  a  version,  if  made,  should  now  only 
live  for  us  in  its  successors,  as  Tyndale's  translation  lives  for 
us  in  the  Authorized  English  version  ? 

I  think  that  some  of  the  coincidences  noted  above,  between 
St.  John  and  Theodotion,  especially  the  TOV  TroXe/x^o-at  of 
No.  (3)  are  more  than  accidental;  but  that  St. John  used  a 
translation  of  some  kind  appears  more  clearly  from  the  very 
numerous  passages  where  Theodotion  and  the  Chisian  agree, 
and  St.  John  agrees  with  both — a  thing  not  likely  to  happen 
so  often  if  he  was  translating  independently.  But  if  St.  John 
used  a  translation,  that  translation  was  not  the  Chisian,  with 
which  he  gives  no  clear  sign  of  agreement.  I  find  instances 
which  may  induce  us  to  think  that  the  version  employed  by 
St.  John  was  not  identical  with  Theodotion's,  but  scarcely 
anything  to  show  that  it  was  the  Septuagint.  I  only  notice 
two  cases  where,  on  a  comparison  of  the  Apocalypse  with  the 
so-called  LXX.  and  Theodotion,  the  advantage  seems  to  be  on 
the  side  of  the  LXX.  These  passages  are  : — 

(l)   Rev.  i.  14:   rj  K€<£aA.r)  avrov  /cat  at  rpt^es  Aev/cat  ws  tpiov 
cos  XL<*>V,  xal  ol   ocjS^aX/Aot  O.VTOV   ws  <j>\o£  irvpo<s   KOL  ol 
avroO  O/X,OUH  xaAKoAi/3dVa>.      Dan.  vii.   9  (LXX.), 


XXVI.]  HERMAS   AND   THEODOTION.  607 


0>CT€t  ^LOVO.  KOi  TO  Tpt^W/Xa  T^5  Ke^aX^S  O.VTOV  d)CT  €t 

KaOapoV  (Theod.),  TO  evSiyxa  avrov  XCVKOV  dxret  XL(^V) 
6pl£  rrj<s  K€<f>aXrj<s  avrov  wo-et  eptoi/  Ka.6a.p6v.  Dan.  X.  6  (LXX.), 
ot  o(£0aXyu,oi  avrov  wo-et  Xa/ATraSes  Trvpos  .  .  .  Kat  ot  TroSes  axret 
^aX/cos  e£ao-TpdVTWV  (Theod.),  ot  6<£0aX/xot  avrov  wcret  Xa/ATraSes 
Trvpos  .  .  .  Kat  TO,  <TK€\r)  us  opacns  ^aXxov  o-TtX/3oi/ros. 

(2)  Rev.  xix.  1  6,  /3curiXeus  y8ao-tXecov  /cat  Ki>ptos  KvptW.  So 
LXX.  (Dan.  iv.  31),  ®eos  TOJV  ^ewv  Kat  Ki;ptos  TOOI/  Kvpicov  Kat 
^ao-tXevs  TWI/  /2ao-tXeW,  to  which  there  is  nothing  correspond 
ing  in  Chaldee  or  Theodotion.  The  former  example  proves, 
if  proof  were  necessary,  that  St.  John  was  not  dependent  on 
Theodotion's  version  ;  but  does  not  prove  that  he  used  the 
LXX.  I  do  not  know  that  any  stronger  proof  of  that  can  be 
given  than  whatever  the  latter  example  may  be  thought  to 
afford. 

Dr.  Gwynn  has  also  examined  the  use  made  of  Daniel  in 
other  N.  T.  books,  and  still  with  the  result  that  that  use  can 
not  be  accounted  for  on  the  supposition  that  the  N.  T.  writers 
used  only  the  Septuagint  version  of  Daniel.  For  example, 
the  words  Karao-K-qvovv  and  ei/  rots  KXaSots,  which  occur  Matt. 
xiii.  32,  are  found  in  Theodotion's  version  of  Dan.  iv.  9;  but 
not  in  the  LXX.,  which  instead  of  Kareovojvow  has  cVoo-o-evoi/. 

So  in  Matt.  xiii.  43,  Dan.  xii.  3,  the  tK\.dp\l/ovo-iv  agrees  with 
the  Xdfjuf/ova-Lv  of  Theodotion  against  the  </>avo9o-ti>  of  the  LXX.; 
and  in  Matt.  xxiv.  21,  Dan.  xii.  21,  Matthew  and  Theodotion 
agree  in  $Xti^is  ota  ov  yeyovev,  where  LXX.  has  ^/xepa  $Xu/fea>s 
ota  ov  eycvrjO-rj. 

In  Mark  xiv.  62,  as  also  in  Rev.  i.  7,  the  Son  of  Man  is 
spoken  of  as  coming  with  (/xcra)  not  on  (CTTI)  the  clouds  ;  in 
this  agreeing  with  Theodotion's  text  against  the  Chisian. 
A  more  doubtful  case  of  coincidence  is  James  i.  12,  which 
is  closer  to  Theodotion's  version  of  Dan.  xii.  12  than  to 
the  LXX. 

Again,  Clement  of  Rome  (c.  34)  quotes  Dan.  viii.  10:  'Ten 
thousand  times  ten  thousand  stood  before  him,  and  thousand 
thousands  ministered  unto  him;'  and  for  'ministered'  he  has 
Theodotion's  word  eXetroupyov^,  not  the  LXX.  e^epdVcvov. 

Further,  the  Apocryphal  Book  of  Baruch  contains  several 
verses  taken  from  Dan.  ix.  ;  Baruch  i.  15-18,  being  nearly 


608  NON-CANONICAL    BOOKS.  [XXVI. 

identical  with  Dan.  ix.  y-io/and  Baruch  ii.  11-16,  with  Dan. 
ix.  15-18.  A  few  critics  bring  down  this  book  (or  the  Greek 
of  it,  if  we  are  to  receive  it  as  a  translation  from  a  Hebrew 
original)  as  late  as  the  reign  of  Vespasian,  and  none  brings  it 
later  ;  but  the  great  majority  regard  it  as  pre-Christian.  Now, 
on  comparing  the  passages,  Baruch  is  found  to  be  consider 
ably  nearer  Theodotion  than  the  LXX.  Thus  :  — 

Bar.  i.  15  ;  ii.  n,    .     .     o>s  77  rj^pa  avrrj.     So  Theod. 

But  LXX.,  .....  Kara  rrjv  rj/jiepav  ra.vrif]v. 

Bar.  i.  16  and  Theod.,  rots  ap^ovcnv  T}/XWV. 

LXX.,      ......  rots  ovvdo-raLS  -^//.cov. 

Bar.  i.  18  and  Theod.,  TropevtcrOai  .  .  .  ols  e'Sco/ce  Kara  Trpocrto- 


LXX.,      ......  KaraKoXovOfjcraL  .  .  .  w 

Mwo"^  /cat  rjfjiiov. 

Bar.  ii.  1  1  and  Theod.,  os  e^yayes  TOV  AaoV  crou. 

LXX.,      ......  6  e^ayaycbv  rov  XaoV  (TOV. 

Bar.  ii.  14  and  Theod.,  clo-aKovcrov  Kvpie. 

LXX.,        ......  tTTOLKOVCrOV  SeO-TTOTa. 

Bar.  ii.  16  and  Theod.,  /cAtVov  TO  ov<s  crov. 

LXX.,     ......  TTpoo-^es,  instead  of  K\lvov. 


The  instances  adduced  not  only  clearly  prove  all  I  want 
to  establish,  namely,  that  coincidences  with  Theodotion's 
version  do  not  prove  that  a  document  is  not  as  early  as  the 
first  century  ;  but  they  seem  to  point  distinctly  to  the  exist 
ence  at  least  in  that  century,  and  probably  much  earlier,  of  a 
version  of  the  Book  of  Daniel  having  closer  affinities  with 
Theodotion's  than  with  the  LXX. 

The  passage  in  Hernias  then  simply  takes  its  place  as  one 
of  many  proofs  of  that  fact.  I  have  given  these  proofs  at 
greater  length  than  was  at  all  necessary  for  my  immediate 
purpose,  on  account  of  the  interest  I  felt  in  Dr.  Gwynn's 
investigations,  which  throw  light  on  a  subject  that  has  been 
very  little  studied  :  that  of  the  history  of  first-century  Greek 
translations  of  the  Old  Testament.  Enough  has  been  said  to 
show  that  if  it  can  be  established  on  other  grounds  that  the 
Book  of  Hermas  belongs  to  the  early  part  of  the  second  cen 
tury,  no  reason  for  rejecting  that  date  is  afforded  by  the  fact 


XXVI.]  TEACHING   OF   THE    TWELVE   APOSTLES.  609 

that  we  find  in  the  book  a  verse  of  Daniel  quoted  in  a  form 
for  which  the  Hexaplar  Septuagint  will  not  account. 

The  Teaching  of  the  Twelve  Apostles.  —  It  would  evidently 
be  impossible  for  me  to  keep  within  reasonable  limits  if  I 
were  to  attempt  to  speak  of  all  the  remains  of  early  Christian 
antiquity  which  present  interesting  subjects  for  discussion. 
I  have  therefore  taken  as  my  guide  the  list  of  works  whose 
claims  to  be  included  in  the  public  use  of  the  Church 
Eusebius  thought  it  worth  while  to  take  into  consideration 
when  making  his  list  of  canonical  books  (H.  E.  iii.  25).  Of 
the  books  there  mentioned  there  remains  but  one  which  I 
have  not  yet  noticed.  In  company  with  the  Epistle  of 
Barnabas,  Eusebius  names  *  what  are  called  the  Teachings  of 
the  Apostles'  (TWV  dTrooToAcov  at  Xeyo/xevat  StSa^at).  I  have 
already  (see  p.  581)  referred  to  the  list  of  canonical  books 
given  some  years  later  by  Athanasius,  in  his  39th  Festal 
Epistle  ;  and  there  you  find,  excluded  from  the  books  of 
Scripture,  but  joined  with  the  Shepherd  of  Hermas,  as  useful 
for  employment  in  catechetical  instruction,  '  what  is  called 
the  Teaching  of  the  Apostles'  (AtSa^  /caAou/xeVi;  ruv  aTroo-ro- 
Aan/)  :  you  will  observe  that  the  singular  number  is  used. 
The  AtSa^  aTroo-ToAcov  is  also  included  in  the  Stichometry  of 
Nicephorus  (see  p.  178).  It  is  found  there  in  an  appendix 
giving  a  list  of  apocryphal  books  of  the  New  Testament,  viz. 
the  Travels  of  Peter,  of  John,  of  Thomas,  the  Gospel  of 
Thomas  :  then  follows  the  Didache,  and  then  books  to  which 
the  name  'apocryphal '  can  only  be  applied  in  the  sense  that 
they  have  no  claim  to  possess  the  authority  of  Scripture,  viz., 
the  Epistles  of  Clement,  of  Ignatius,  of  Polycarp,  and  the 
Shepherd.  In  this  list  the  length  of  the  AtSa^  is  given  as 
200  O-TI'XOI,*  by  which  we  see  that  it  was  a  short  book,  since 
in  the  same  list  the  Apocalypse  of  St.  John  is  said  to  contain 
1400  O-TC'XOI. 

Until  very  recently  we  could  only  form  a  vague  judgment 
that  the  work  known  to  Athanasius  and  Eusebius  must  have 
been  the  nucleus  round  which  gathered  the  institutions  which 
form  the  extant  eight  books  of  Apostolic  Constitutions.  It  is 

*  Harnack  calculates  that  the  Didache  published  by  Bryennius  would 
make  300  ori\oi. 

2  R 


6 10  NON-CANONICAL   BOOKS.  [XXVI. 

now  agreed  that  this  work,  in  its  present  form,  is  not  earlier 
than  the  middle  of  the  fourth  century ;  and  in  recent  times 
much  has  been  done  to  trace  the  history  of  the  growth  of  the 
collection.     The  subject  is  too  wide  a  one  for  me  to  attempt 
to  enter  into  it ;  but  it  is  necessary  to  mention  an  ancient 
tract,  the  foundation  of  Egyptian  Ecclesiastical  Law,  first 
published  in  Greek  from  a  Vienna  MS.  by  Bickell  (Geschichte 
des  Kirchenrechts,  1843),  but  extant  also  in  Coptic,  ^thiopic, 
Syriac,  and  Arabic.     Bickell  called  it  Apostolische  Kirchenord- 
nung;  and,  in  order  to  distinguish  it  from  the  Apostolic  Con 
stitutions,  which,  in  their  present  form,  are  certainly  a  later 
work,   I  shall  refer  to  this  under  the  name  of  the  '  Church 
Ordinances.'     Its  title  in  the  Greek  MS.  is  at  Starayat  at  Sta 
KAry/xevros  /cat  /cavoves  e/CKXrycrtacrTt/cot  rcov  ayi'wv  aVoo'ToAan'.      It 
may   be   divided  into   two  parts ;    in  the   first  each  of  the 
Apostles  is  introduced  as  giving  a  piece  of  moral  instruction; 
in  the  second  part  the  Apostles  in  like  manner  severally  give 
directions  about  ordinations  and  other  Church  rites.     I  may 
mention  that  the  number  of  twelve  Apostles  is  made  out  in  a 
singular   way.     Cephas   is   made   an  Apostle   distinct   from 
Peter :  he  and  Nathanael  take  the  place  of  James  the  Less 
and  Matthias.     Paul  is  not  mentioned  at  all.     Now,  when 
this  tract  is  compared  with  the  seventh  book  of  the  Apostolic 
Constitutions,  the  latter  is  found  to  begin  with  a  large  expansion 
of  the  moral  instruction  contained  in  the  first  part  of  the 
former ;  and  the  conclusion  suggests  itself  that  this  tract  was 
one  of  the  sources  employed  by  the  compiler  of  the  Apostolic 
Constitutions.     Further,    this   moral   instruction  begins  with 
what  we  may  regard  as  a  commentary  on  Jer.  xxi.  8,  '  Behold 
I  set  before  you  the  way  of  life  and  the  way  of  death/  words 
which    may  themselves  be  connected   with   Deut.  xxx.   15, 
'  See,  I  have  set  before  you  this  day  life  and  good,  death 
and  evil.'     The  '  Church  Ordinances '  set  forth  in  detail  the 
characteristics  of  these  '  Two  Ways.'     One  sentence  of  this 
exposition  is  quoted  by  Clement  of  Alexandria  as  Scripture 
(Strom,  i.  20,  p.   377),  whether  he  got  it  in  the   '  Church 
Ordinances'   themselves,    or  in  an  earlier  document,    from 
which  they  borrowed,  '  My  son,  be  not  a  liar ;  for  lying  leads 
to  theft.' 


XXVI.]  TEACHING   OF   THE   TWELVE    APOSTLES.  6ll 

The  use  of  an  earlier  document  is  made  probable  by  our 
finding  elsewhere  this  teaching  about  the  '  Two  Ways/  The 
Epistle  of  Barnabas  consists  of  two  parts.  The  first  part, 
which  contains  the  doctrinal  teaching,  is  brought  formally  to 
a  close  in  ch.  17,  and  then  the  writer  abruptly  says,  Let  us 
now  pass  to  another  doctrine  and  teaching  (yvuxnv  KO.L 
Si&xx^v).  And  then  he  proceeds  to  give  the  teaching  of 
the  '  Two  Ways,'  presenting  numerous  coincidences  with 
the  corresponding  section  in  the  'Church  Ordinances.'  Now, 
a  curious  fact  is,  that  this  second  section  of  Barnabas  is  not 
extant  in  the  ancient  Latin  translation  ;  whence  suspicion  has 
arisen  as  to  the  genuineness  of  this  portion  of  the  Epistle. 
But  any  hesitation  as  to  accepting  the  testimony  of  the  Greek 
text  is  removed  by  the  fact  that  passages  from  this  section 
are  expressely  quoted  as  from  Barnabas  by  Clement  of 
Alexandria  (Strom,  ii.  18,  p.  471),  and  by  Origen  (De  Princ. 
in.  ii.  4).  And  it  may  be  added,  as  bearing  on  the  question 
presently  to  be  considered,  whether  Barnabas  was  original  in 
this  part  of  his  teaching,  that  Origen,  at  least,  appears  to 
consider  him  so,  quoting  him  as  the  authority  for  the  teach 
ing  concerning  the  '  Two  Ways.'  The  probable  explanation 
of  the  omission  of  this  section  by  the  Latin  translator  is, 
that  he  left  it  out  because  the  West  was  already  in  possession 
of  the  teaching  concerning  the  '  Two  Ways  '  in  another  form. 
Evidence  of  the  existence  of  such  a  form  is  found  in  the 
commentary  on  the  Creed  by  Rufinus,  written  towards  the 
end  of  the  fourth  century.  He  gives  (cc.  37,  38)  a  list  of 
canonical  and  ecclesiastical  books,  founded  on  that  of 
Athanasius ;  but  whereas  Athanasius  couples  the  Didach6 
with  the  Shepherd,  Rufinus  has  in  the  corresponding  place, 
'libellus  qui  dicitur  Pastoris,  sive  Hermas ;  qui  appellatur 
Duae  vise,  vel  Judicium  Petri.'  Now,  it  is  to  be  observed, 
that  whereas  Eusebius  (iii.  3),  enumerating  the  apocryphal 
books  bearing  the  name  of  the  Apostle  Peter,  gives  the  titles 
of  four  works — the  Acts,  the  Gospel,  the  Preaching,  and  the 
Revelation  of  Peter — Jerome  in  his  Catalogue  adds  a  fifth,  the 
Judgment  of  Peter.  We  cannot  but  think  that  the  works 
mentioned  by  Rufinus  and  Jerome  are  the  same;  and  the 
second  title,  the  '  Two  Ways,'  leads  us  to  think  that  it  must 

2  R  2 


6l2  NON-CANONICAL   BOOKS.  [XXVI. 

have  contained  the  same  matter  as  is  found  in  the  second 
part  of  Barnabas,  and  in  the  '  Church  Ordinances,'  only  that 
instead  of  this  teaching  being,  as  in  the  latter  book,  dis 
tributed  among  the  Apostles,  it  was  apparently,  in  the 
Western  book,  put  into  the  mouth  of  Peter. 

The  facts  of  which  I  have  given  a  summary  were  discussed 
in  an  able  Paper  by  a  Roman  Catholic  divine,  Krawutzcky, 
in  the  Theol.  Quart alschrift,  1882,  who  drew  from  them  the 
following  inferences  :  that,  as  early  as  the  second  century, 
the  section  in  Barnabas  which  treated  of  the  '  Two  Ways  ' 
was  expanded  and  formed  into  a  separate  tract ;  that  it  came 
into  Church  use,  and  was  the  work  cited  as  Scripture  by 
Clement  of  Alexandria ;  that,  to  give  greater  weight  to  the 
teaching,  it  was  put  into  the  mouth  of  Peter ;  that  this  work 
was  made  use  of  by  the  compiler  of  the  '  Church  Ordinances,' 
who  made  the  alteration  of  distributing  the  teaching  among 
the  twelve  Apostles ;  that  the  compiler  of  the  seventh  book 
of  the  Apostolic  Constitutions,  without  any  acquaintance  with 
the  'Church  Ordinances,'  made  independent  use  of  the  'Two 
Ways;'  so  that  by  comparison  of  the  'Constitutions'  and 
4  Ordinances,'  a  restoration  of  the  earlier  work  which  fur 
nished  a  common  element  to  both  might  be  obtained. 

Within  two  years  scholars  found  reason  to  think  that  it 
was  quite  true  that  the  '  Constitutions '  and  '  Ordinances ' 
had  a  common  source,  but  that  there  was  no  need  of  con 
jectural  restoration  in  order  to  recover  it.  I  have  related 
(p.  578)  the  discovery  by  Bryennius  at  Constantinople  of  a 
complete  copy  of  Clement's  Epistles.  The  same  volume 
contained  other  Ecclesiastical  writings,  and  in  particular  a 
complete  Greek  text  of  Barnabas.  The  attention  of  th& 
discoverer  seems  at  first  to  have  been  quite  absorbed  by  the 
use  to  be  made  of  his  volume  in  restoring  the  text  of  pre 
viously  known  documents ;  and  though  he  published  his 
edition  of  Clement  in  1875,  it  was  not  till  the  close  of  1883 
that  he  gave  to  the  world  a  previously  unpublished  work 
contained  in  the  same  volume.  This  bears  the  heading 
*  Teaching  of  the  Twelve  Apostles '  (AiSa;^  TWV  SwSeKa 
a-TToorroXcov),  and  commences,  'Teaching  of  the  Lord  by  the 
twelve  Apostles  to  the  Gentiles.'  It  then  goes  on  to  give  the 


XXVI.]  TEACHING   OF   THE   TWELVE   APOSTLES.  613 

teaching  of  the  'Two  Ways,'  which  occupies  the  first  half  of 
the  tract.  Then  follows  a  second  part,  giving  directions 
first  about  baptism,  then  about  Eucharistic  formulae,  then 
about  Church  teachers,  and  in  conclusion  there  is  an  escha- 
tological  passage  treating  of  the  Second  Coming  of  our  Lord. 
This  work  bears  every  mark  of  very  great  antiquity;  and 
it  has  been  commonly  accepted  as  belonging  to  the  be 
ginning  of  the  second  century,  if  not  to  the  latter  part  of  the 
first.  And  it  has  been  generally  recognized  as  the  work 
known  to  Eusebius  and  Athanasius,  and  as  the  common 
source  of  '  Ordinances  '  and  '  Constitutions.'  Krawutzcky, 
however,  resists  the  temptation  to  regard  the  Didach6  as  the 
fulfilment  of  his  critical  anticipations.  He  maintains  that 
the  result  of  a  comparison  of  the  '  Ordinances '  and  the 
Didach6  is  not  that  the  one  book  borrows  from  the  other, 
but  that  both  have  employed  a  common  source.  And  he 
holds  that  the  Didach6  displays  Ebionite  tendencies,  and 
was  probably  not  written  before  the  close  of  the  second 
century.  And  it  is  quite  true  that  there  is  much  in  the  book 
that  not  only  a  Roman  Catholic,  as  Krawutzcky  is,  might 
naturally  dislike  to  accept  as  orthodox  teaching,  but  with 
which  even  a  member  of  our  own  Church  cannot  feel  satis 
fied. 

I  do  not  count  among  reasonable  causes  of  offence  that 
the  book  displays  great  immaturity  of  Church  organization, 
but  rather  accept  this  as  a  proof  of  the  great  antiquity  of 
the  document.  In  that  part  which  treats  of  Church  teachers 
the  foremost  place  is  given  to  Apostles  and  Prophets.  But 
the  word  '  Apostle '  has  not  the  limited  meaning  to  which 
modern  usage  restricts  it.  The  '  Apostles '  are  wandering 
missionaries  or  envoys  of  the  Churches.  Directions  are  given 
as  to  the  respect  to  be  paid  to  an  Apostle,  and  the  entertain 
ment  to  be  afforded  him  by  a  Church  through  which  he 
might  pass  ;  but  it  is  assumed  that  he  does  not  contemplate 
making  a  permanent  stay.  On  the  contrary,  if  he  demands 
lodging  for  more  than  two  nights,  or  if  on  leaving  he  asks 
from  his  entertainers  a  larger  supply  than  will  suffice  to  carry 
him  to  his  next  lodging,  he  shows  that  he  is  no  true  prophet. 
Now,  the  word  aTrooroAos  was  in  Jewish  use  applied  to 


6 14  NON -CANONICAL   BOOKS.  [XXVI. 

messengers  sent  by  the  rulers  at  Jerusalem  with  letters  to  Jewish 
communities  elsewhere  ;*  it  is  used  in  the  New  Testament  of 
envoys  or  commissioned  messengers  of  the  Churches  (2  Cor. 
viii.  23  ;  Phil.  ii.  25)  ;  but  those  are  called  in  a  special  sense 
Apostles  who  derived  their  commission  not  from  men,  but 
from  Jesus  Christ.  Hermas,  also  (Sim.  ix.  15),  appears  to  use 
the  word  in  a  wide  sense,  representing  the  building  of  the 
Church  as  effected  by  forty '  apostles  and  teachers,'  and  these 
as  not  holding  the  foremost  place  in  the  work.  The  use  of 
the  word,  therefore,  in  the  Didach6  affords  no  cause  of  offence, 
but  attests  the  antiquity  of  the  document.  The  chief  place  in 
the  instruction  of  the  local  Church  is  assigned  to  the  '  pro 
phets/  whose  utterances  were  to  be  received  with  the  respect 
due  to  their  divine  inspiration,  and  who  were  entitled  to 
receive  from  their  congregations  such  dues  as  the  Jews  had 
been  wont  to  render  to  the  high  priests.  The  possibility  is 
contemplated  that  in  the  Church  there  might  be  !no  prophet. 
In  that  case  the  first-fruits  are  to  be  given  to  the  poor. 
Mention  is  also  made  of  teachers,  by  which  I  understand 
persons  who  gave  public  instruction  in  the  Church,  but  who 
did  not  speak  '  in  the  spirit/  as  the  prophets  did.  The  place 
assigned  to  the  prophets  corresponds  very  well  with  the  state 
of  things  which  I  infer  from  Hermas,  but  with  this  notable 
difference,  that  in  Hermas  the  prophets  appear  to  be  subor 
dinate  to  the  presbyters.  Here,  on  the  contrary,  the  first 
mention  is  only  of  apostles  and  prophets;  then  directions  are 
given  for  Sunday  Eucharistic  celebration,  and  then  is  added 
'  elect,  therefore,-\io  yourselves  bishops  and  deacons.'  These, 
we  are  told,  are  to  be  honoured  with  the  prophets  and  teachers, 

*  See  references  in  Lightfoot  (Galatians,  p.  92). { 

t  The  Didache  fails  to  give  any  confirmation  to  the  theory  put  forward 
by  Dr.  Hatch  in  his  'Bampton  Lectures,'  that  bishops  and  deacons  were 
primarily  appointed  for  the  administration  of  the  Church  funds.  Knowing 
that  such  administration  was  one  of  the  bishop's  functions  in  the  time  of 
Justin  Martyr,  we  are  rather  surprised  to  find  no  mention  in  the  Didache 
that  gifts  intended  for  the  poor  passed  through  the  hands  of  the  bishops 
or  deacons.  Whatever  may  be  meant  by  '  the  gifts'  in  Clem.  Rom.,  ch. 
44,  the  function  there  ascribed  to  the  presbyters  is  that  of  offering,  not  of 
administering  them ;  and  the  displaced  Corinthian  presbyters  are  com 
mended,  not  for  the  integrity  with  which  they  had  discharged  the  latter 
office,  but  for  the  meekness  with  which  they  had  «  borne  their  faculties '  in 
the  former. 


XXVI.]  TEACHING   OF   THE    TWELVE   APOSTLES.  615 

as  fulfilling  like  ministration.  The  inference  then  suggests 
itself  that  at  the  time  this  document  was  written  the  Eucharist 
was  only  consecrated  by  the  president  of  the  Church  assembly, 
who  held  a  permanent  office,  and  who,  probably,  might  also 
be  a  preacher  ;  but  that  in  the  mind  of  the  writer  the  inspired 
givers  of  public  instruction  held  the  higher  place.  No  men 
tion  is  made  of  the  necessity  of  obedience  to  any  central 
authority  at  Jerusalem,  Rome,  or  elsewhere.  Whether  the 
state  of  ecclesiastical  organization  here  indicated  agree  or 
not  with  what  we  may  think  likely  to  have  existed  in  Apostolic 
times,  and  whether  we  accept  the  author  as  a  witness  to 
the  general  practice  of  the  Church  in  his  time,  or  only  as  to 
that  which  prevailed  in  his  own  locality,  or  according  to  his 
own  notions  of  fitness,  still  there  is  no  reason  for  setting  him 
down  as  a  heretic,  and  the  unlikeness  of  his  account  to  the 
constitution  which  we  know  became  general  before  the 
second  century  was  far  advanced,  may  be  taken  as  proof  of 
the  writer's  antiquity. 

I  find  much  more  cause  of  offence  in  the  Eucharistic 
prayers  which  are  given  (cc.  9,  10).  In  the  first  place,  we 
are  surprised  to  find  information  given  as  to  the  most  sacred 
mysteries  of  the  religion  in  a  document  clearly  intended  for 
the  instruction  of  catechumens.  It  is  free  to  us,  no  doubt,  to 
suppose  that  in  that  early  age  no  reserve  was  practised  ;  but 
Athanasius  recommended  that  the  book  known  to  him  as 
the  Didactic"  should  be  employed  in  catechetical  instruction. 
Would  he  use  it  for  such  a  purpose  if  it  revealed  what  only 
'the  faithful  know'?  These  Eucharistic  prayers  themselves 
contain  no  mention  of  our  Lord's  institution  of  the  rite,  and 
no  mention  of  His  Body  and  Blood.  And  through  the  whole 
document  I  find  no  unequivocal  proof  that  the  writer  really 
believed  in  our  Lord's  Divinity,  or  that  he  looked  on  Him  as 
more  than  a  divinely  commissioned  teacher.  Krawutzcky 
remarks  that  the  writer  is  silent  as  to  the  doctrines  of  the 
Incarnation  and  Redemption  and  of  the  sending  of  the  Holy 
Ghost.  Still,  if  he  was  an  Ebionite,  he  belonged  to  the 
better  sort  of  them  ;  he  is  certainly  no  Elkesaite.  He  gives 
directions  for  the  blessing  of  the  Cup  ;  but  in  the  ascetic  sect 
from  which  the  pseudo-Clementines  emanated,  wine  does  not 


6l6  NON-CANONICAL   BOOKS.  [XXVI. 

seem  to  have  been  employed,  even  in  Eucharistic  celebra 
tion. 

In  deciding  as  to  the  date  of  the  Didache",  a  crucial  question 
is  the  determination  of  its  relation  to  Barnabas  and  Hennas. 
In  the  case  of  Barnabas  the  obligations  on  the  one  side  or 
the  other  are  too  extensive  to  admit  of  dispute.  The  parallel 
passages  of  Barnabas  occupy  four  pages  in  Bryennius's  edition. 
Bryennius  himself  entertains  no  doubt  that  the  Didach6  was 
indebted  both  to  Barnabas  and  Hernias,  and  this  view  is  also 
taken  by  Hilgenfeld,  Harnack,  and  Krawutzcky.  Eut  Zahn 
and  other  good  critics  hold  the  opposite  opinion  ;  and  they 
advance  arguments  which  seem  to  me  to  prove  decisively  that 
in  that  part  of  the  Didactic*  which  treats  of  the  '  Two  Ways ' 
there  is  no  obligation  to  Barnabas.  The  precepts  in  the 
Didache  are  systematically  arranged,  following  the  order  of 
the  Decalogue,  on  which  they  serve  as  a  commentary ;  in 
Barnabas  they  are  quite  promiscuous.  It  is  not  a  probable 
hypothesis  that  the  author  of  the  Didactic*  went  through  Bar 
nabas,  picking  out  the  moral  precepts,  and  that  he  succeeded 
in  arranging  his  excerpts  into  a  symmetrical  whole.  Yet  if 
I  am  right  in  referring  Barnabas  to  the  decade  A.  D.  70-80,  if 
the  Didache*  was  so  much  older,  and  had  so  much  authority  as 
to  be  thought  worth  pillaging  by  Barnabas,  its  claims  to  be 
really  an  Apostolic  document  deserve  serious  consideration  ; 
and  how  are  we  to  explain  the  very  limited  circulation  which 
this  truly  Apostolic  teaching  obtained,  so  that  it  has  had  the 
very  narrowest  escape  of  perishing  altogether  ? 

In  solving  this  difficulty  I  have  found  the  greatest  assistance 
from  a  study  of  the  Didactic"  in  connexion  with  the  Talmud, 
by  Dr.  Taylor.*  It  results  from  his  investigations  that  the 
Didach6  is  an  intensely  Jewish  document,  and  that  its 
contents  are  so  well  accounted  for  by  the  use  of  Jewish 
sources,  that  we  lose  all  temptation  to  imagine  that  the  author 
had  need  to  resort  to  Barnabas  for  guidance.  But  Dr.  Taylor's 

*  The  Teaching  of  the  Twelve  Apostles ;  with  Illustrations  from  the 
Talmud,  by  C.  Taylor,  D.D.,  Master  of  St.  John's  College,  Cambridge. 
See  also  the  Expositor,  3rd  Series  (1866),  III.  316,  401.  I  am  unable  to 
notice  other  more  recent  Papers  by  Dr.  Taylor  and  others,  not  having  given 
any  study  to  the  Didache  since  the  publication  of  the  last  edition  of  this 
book. 


XXVI.]  TEACHING   OF   THE   TWELVE   APOSTLES.  617 

illustrations  did  more  than  bring  me  to  his  conclusion  that 
the  author  of  the  Didach6  had  received  a  Jewish  training; 
they  seemed  to  me  to  make  it  probable  that  the  '  Two  Ways ' 
is  a  pre-Christian  work :  in  other  words,  that  the  author  of 
the  Didach£  has  taken  a  Jewish  manual  of  instruction  for 
proselytes,  and  has  adapted  it  for  Christian  use  by  additions 
of  his  own  ;  in  particular  by  insertions  from  the  Sermon  on 
the  Mount.  This  hypothesis  would  account  for  the  heading, 
Teaching  of  the  Twelve  Apostles  to  the  Gentiles.  It  has  been 
remarked  by  several  that  there  is  nothing  in  the  work  which 
suggests  that  it  is  intended  for  exclusively  Gentile  use  ;  nay, 
that  as  I  have  intimated  before,  it  does  not  even  seem  adapted 
for  the  use  of  catechumens,  Jews,  or  Gentiles.  But  the  title 
would  be  accounted  for  if  the  original  of  the  document  were 
a  manual  of  instruction  for  Gentile  proselytes  to  Judaism. 
There  was  at  least  sufficient  inducement  to  take  this  as  a 
working  hypothesis,  and  see  how  it  would  bear  examination. 
For  there  is  a  test  which  can  be  applied  to  it,  namely,  to 
examine  whether  Barnabas  knew  the  Didache  in  its  pre 
sent  Christianized  form.  If  he  did,  Barnabas  was  so  early 
that  it  is  unreasonable  to  assume  that  there  was  an  earlier 
form.  On  the  other  hand,  if  Barnabas  knew,  not  the 
Didache,  but  the  supposed  Jewish  parent  of  the  Didach6,  it 
is  likely  that  when  he  adapted  it  to  the  use  of  his  Christian 
disciples,  the  Jewish  element  in  the  work  would  no  doubt 
remain  the  same  as  in  the  Didache ;  but  that  the  additions 
of  specially  New  Testament  teaching  would,  except  for 
some  chance  coincidences,  be  different.  Now,  when  we 
look  at  the  four  pages  in  Bryennius  which  contain  Bar- 
nabas's  adaptation  of  the  '  Two  Ways/  we  find  that  he  has 
not  Christianized  it  at  all.  There  is  no  use  of  the  Gospels, 
no  mention  of  Jesus  Christ,  not  a  word  that  might  not  have 
been  written  before  our  Lord  was  born.  I  do  not  know  how 
it  will  appear  to  others,  but  to  my  mind  it  comes  with  the 
force  of  demonstration,  Barnabas  never  saw  the  Didache\ 
I  find  it  impossible  to  believe  that  if  he  knew  that  work  he 
would  have  gone  over  it,  adapting  it  to  his  use  by  carefully 
erasing  every  line  which  contained  anything  of  specially 
Christian  teaching,  or  which  implied  a  knowledge  of  oral  or 


6l8  NON-CANONICAL   BOOKS.  [XXVI. 

written  Gospels.  Traces  of  such  knowledge  may  be  found  in 
other  parts  of  the  Epistle  of  Barnabas,  but  not  in  this  section. 
The  supposition  that  the  Didache"  had  a  Jewish  original  be 
comes  thus  something  more  than  a  mere  hypothesis :  it  is  a 
conclusion  forced  on  us  if  we  believe  that  Barnabas  did  not 
use  the  Didach6,  and  that  the  Didach6  did  not  use  Barnabas. 
The  difference  of  order  in  the  two  documents  is  at  once  ex 
plained.  The  author  of  the  Didactic*  wrote  with  the  Jewish 
original  before  him,  and  systematically  followed  its  order  ; 
Barnabas,  merely  in  giving  practical  exhortation,  interwove, 
as  his  memory  furnished  them,  precepts  from  a  manual  with 
which  he  had  formerly  been  familiar.*  And  if  he  did  not 
reproduce  very  accurately  either  the  language  or  the  order 
of  the  document  he  used,  this,  as  Dr.  Taylor  has  remarked, 
ought  not  to  surprise  anyone  who  considers  how  Barnabas 
deals  with  the  Old  Testament. 

If  we  admit  that  the  Didactic*  is  but  a  Christianized  form 
of  an  originally  Jewish  book,  the  question  whether  the  writer 
who  gave  the  work  its  present  form  knew  Barnabas  assumes 
a  different  aspect.  For,  besides  the  section  on  the  'Two 
Ways,'  common  to  both  books,  there  is  one  clear  coincidence 
between  the  early  part  of  Barnabas  and  the  last  chapter  of 
the  Didache',  an  entirely  Christian  chapter,  which  treats  of 
the  Second  Coming  of  our  Lord.  If  I  am  right  in  supposing 
that  Barnabas  did  not  know  the  Didactic"  in  its  present  form, 
the  obligation  cannot  be  on  his  side.  On  the  other  hand,  all 
the  marks  of  superior  antiquity  that  have  been  found  in  the 
Didach6  belong  to  the  Jewish  element  in  the  book,  so  that 
there  is  no  reason  for  denying  an  acquaintance  with  Barna 
bas  on  the  part  of  the  writer  who  contributed  the  Christian 
element.  There  is  a  difficult  phrase  in  this  last  chapter, 
which,  if  we  could  only  be  sure  that  we  interpret  it  rightly, 
would  afford  a  more  direct  proof  of  the  dependence  of  that 
chapter  on  Barnabas.  It  gives  as  the  first  of  three  signs  of 


*  This  introduces  a  new  element  for  the  determination  of  the  question 
(p.  569),  whether  or  not  the  so -called  Barnabas  was  a  Jew.  I  now  suspect 
that  he  had  been  a  Gentile  proselyte  to  Judaism,  and  had  thus  become 
acquainted  with  the  'Two  Ways.' 


XXVI.]  TEACHING   OF   THE   TWELVE   APOSTLES.  619 

our  Lord's  immediate  coming,  tr^/Actov  eKTreracrecos  ev  ovpavw. 
I  think  Archdeacon  Edwin  Palmer  has  given  the  best  expla 
nation  of  this.  He  refers  to  the  words  of  Isaiah  (Ixv.  2),  '  I 
have  stretched  forth  (e^eTreVacra)  my  hands  to  a  disobedient 
and  gainsaying  people.'  Barnabas  interprets  this  of  our 
Lord's  'stretching  forth'  His  hands  on  the  cross  ;  and  Justin 
Martyr  (Apol.  i.  35  ;  Trypho  197)  and  several  other  fathers 
follow  him  in  giving  this  mystical  meaning  to  the  verb 
<KTT€TdvvvfjLL.  If  we  could  count  the  author  of  the  Didactic" 
in  the  number  of  these  followers,  his  phrase  is  at  once  ex 
plained  as  meaning  the  sign  of  the  cross.  If  this  explanation 
be  right,  the  relative  order  of  Barnabas  and  this  part  of  the 
Didactic"  is  determined.  If  Barnabas  came  first,  the  phrase 
in  the  Didactic*  is  explained ;  but  if  the  Didactic"  came  first, 
a  phrase  so  obscure  would  never  suggest  to  Barnabas  his 
interpretation  of  Isaiah,  and  without  that  interpretation  we 
should  be  at  a  loss  to  know  how  the  phrase  came  to  be 
adopted. 

The  coincidences  between  the  Didactic"  and  Hermas  are 
much  fewer  than  in  the  case  of  Barnabas,  and  there  is  even 
room,  for  dispute  whether  there  is  literary  obligation  on  either 
side.  I  myself  did  not  regard  the  coincidences  as  accidental ; 
but,  believing  Hermas  to  be  later  than  Barnabas,  I  did  not 
care  to  give  the  matter  much  examination,  it  being  likely 
enough  that  the  Jewish  document  which  was  used  by  Barna 
bas  would  be  known  also  to  Hermas,  and  used  by  him.  Fur 
ther  consideration,  however,  has  led  me  to  give  a  different 
explanation  of  the  coincidences  in  question.  The  most  im 
portant  are  to  be  found  in  the  first  chapter  of  the  Didactic",  a 
chapter  in  which  large  use  is  made  of  our  Lord's  Sermon  on 
the  Mount.  Now,  Gebhardt  has  brought  to  light  a  short 
Latin  fragment,  containing  the  commencement  of  the  Teach 
ing  of  the  Apostles ;  and  in  this  there  is  no  trace  of  the 
1  Sermon  on  the  Mount'  section.  That  this  is  no  accidental 
omission  is  proved  by  a  passage  in  Lactantius  (Div.  Inst.  vi.  3), 
where  he  delivers  the  doctrine  of  the  '  Two  Ways '  in  a  form 
agreeing  with  the  Latin  fragment  in  all  the  points  in  which 
that  differs  from  Bryennius's  Didactic",  so  as  to  leave  no  doubt 
that  the  fragment  truly  represents  the  form  in  which  the 


620  NON-CANONICAL    BOOKS.  [XXVI. 

Teaching  circulated  in  the  West.*  Neither  is  any  trace  of  the 
'Sermon  on  the  Mount'  section  found  in  writings  ascribed 
to  Athanasius  which  appear  to  use  the  Didach6 ;  and  it  has 
been  already  stated  that  the  length  set  down  for  the  Didache 
in  a  stichometry  favours  the  opinion  that  the  work  intended 
was  a  shorter  one  than  that  published  by  Bryennius. 

While,  then,  I  hold  to  the  opinion  that  the  original  nucleus 
of  the  Didach6  was  pre-Christian,  I  am  led  to  the  further 
conclusion  that  Bryennius's  form  is  not  that  even  in  which 
the  Didach6  first  appeared  as  a  Christian  document.  On 
examining  the  coincidences  with  Hermas  which  are  to  be 
found  in  the  '  Sermon  on  the  Mount '  section,  which  there 
is  reason  to  regard  as  belonging  to  the  latest  part  of  the 
document,  the  priority  seems  to  me  to  be  clearly  on  the  side 
of  Hermas  ;  and  therefore  I  consider  that,  though  the  earliest 
Christian  form  of  the  Didache"  is  probably  earlier  than  Her 
mas,  the  section  in  question  was  added  by  one  who  had  read 
Hermas.  He  who  added  this  section  may  well  have  added 
more ;  and  I  am  inclined  to  believe  that  the  other  places 
where  coincidences  with  Hermas  occur  are  also  not  original. 
The  earliest  proof  of  acquaintance  with  the  Didactic"  in  its 
present  form  is  to  be  found  in  the  Apostolic  Constitutions  y 
compiled  after  the  middle  of  the  fourth  century,  which 
exhibit  a  clear  use  of  Bryennius's  Didache\  The  document 
which  I  have  called  the  Church  Ordinances  is  clearly  later 
than  Barnabas,  but  antecedent  to  Bryennius's  form.  I  do  not 
venture  to  say  whether  the  compiler  used  the  Didach6  in  its 
Jewish  or  in  its  early  Christian  form. 

The  theory,  then,  about  the  Didache  which  most  commends 
itself  to  me  is  that  it  had  for  its  original  a  form  used  by  Jews 
for  the  instruction  of  proselytes  :  that  this  form  continued  to 
be  used  in  the  Palestinian  Churches,  with  some  slight  addi 
tions  and  alterations,  giving  it  a  more  Christian  aspect ;  that 
the  document  (being  intended,  not  for  literary  circulation, 

*  There  is  one  Western  quotation  from  Doctrines  Apostolorum  (pseudo- 
Cyprian,  De  Aleatoribus,  p.  96,  Hartel).  It  has  affinities  with  a  passage 
in  Bryennius's  Didache,  but  differs  a  good  deal  in  form.  Harnack  has 
lately  ascribed  the  authorship  of  this  tract  De  Aleatoribus  to  Victor  of 
Rome  ;  but  for  reasons  which  I  cannot  state  here  at  length,  I  count  it 
impossible  that  it  can  be  quite  so  early. 


XXVI.]  TEACHING   OF   THE    TWELVE   APOSTLES.  621 

but  for  practical  use)  received  additions  from  time  to  time ; 
and  that  when  it  came  to  be  known  outside  the  Churches  of 
Jewish  descent,  it  circulated  first  in  its  shorter,  afterwards  in 
a  longer,  form.  I  do  not  believe  that  the  work  at  any  time  had 
extensive  influence  or  circulation.  The  testimonies  exhibiting 
knowledge  of  the  existence  of  a  book  of 'Apostolical  Teaching' 
appear  to  me  to  be  really  few.  I  do  not  find,  for  example,  in 
the  extant  works  of  Irenaeus*  or  Tertullian,  evidence  of  know 
ledge  of  the  existence  of  such  a  book.  Clement  of  Alexandria 
might  have  brought  a  copy  from  Palestine  to  Egypt ;  but  this 
I  take  to  have  been  in  the  shorter  form,  which  alone  is  heard 
of  until  the  time  of  the  Apostolic  Constitutions. 

If  the  view  I  have  taken  be  correct,  that  the  Didache",  as 
we  know  it,  was  a  work  of  very  limited  circulation  and  in 
fluence,  which  spread  but  little  and  slowly  outside  the 
purely  Jewish  section  of  the  Church,  it  ceases  to  be  of 
much  importance  in  the  history  of  the  Christian  Church  ; 
and  any  inferences  we  draw  from  it  are  affected  by  the 
uncertainty  whether  certain  portions  of  the  book,  as  we  now 
have  it,  belong  to  the  earliest  form.  But,  on  the  other  hand, 
the  book  gains  in  importance  when  regarded  as  a  contribution 
to  the  history  of  Judaism,  exhibiting  the  religious  training 
which  had  been  received  by  pious  Jews  before  the  Gospel  was 
preached  to  them.  I  therefore  turn  back  to  examine  how 
much  of  the  Didactic"  can  be  supposed  to  have  been  based  on 
a  previously  existing  Jewish  manual.  To  that  manual  we 
naturally  refer  the  first  five  chapters  containing  the  '  Two 
Ways.'  The  sixth  is  a  short  chapter,  giving  license  to  the 
disciple,  in  matters  of  food,  not  to  bear  the  whole  yoke  if  he 
is  not  able,  but  insisting  on  his  at  least  abstaining  from  things 
offered  in  sacrifice  to  idols.  Nothing  forbids  us  to  think  that 
this  was  a  rule  of  life  prescribed  by  Jews  to  a  proselyte,  and 

*  There  is,  I  think,  reasonable  ground  to  infer  knowledge  of  the  Didache 
from  one  of  the  mysterious  fragments,  as  from  Irenaeus,  published  by  Pfaff 
from  a  Turin  Catena,  which  has  since  disappeared.  I  see  no  reason  to 
doubt,  that  Pfaff  found  the  extracts  ascribed  to  Irenaeus  in  the  MS.  which  he 
copied  ;  but  Catenae  often  make  mistakes  in  their  ascription  of  authorship, 
and  though  I  believe  the  extract  in  question  to  have  been  from  the  work  of 
an  ancient  author,  I  do  not  believe  that  that  author  was  Irenseus.  Zahn's 
remark  is  conclusive,  that  this  fragment  quotes  the  Epistle  to  the  Hebrews 
as  St.  Paul's. 


622  ^7ON-CANONICAL    BOOKS.  [XXVI. 

the  whole   chapter  may  have  been  found  textually  in   the 
original  manual. 

The  seventh  chapter  treats  of  baptism.  The  candidate  is 
previously  to  have  been  taught  all  the  preceding  instructions  ; 
then  he  is  to  be  baptized  in  the  name  of  Father,  Son,  and 
Holy  Ghost.  The  baptism  is  to  take  place  in  preference  in 
running  water ;  if  this  cannot  be  had,  in  standing  water  ;  if 
cold  water  cannot  be  had,  it  may  take  place  in  warm  water ; 
by  which  we  are  apparently  to  understand  that  if  neither  river 
nor  pond  were  accessible,  the  baptism  might  take  place  in 
drawn  water,  such  as  that  of  a  bath.  If  water  in  sufficient 
quantity  could  not  be  had,  water  might  be  thrice  poured  on 
the  head  in  the  name  of  Father,  Son,  and  Holy  Ghost. 
Both  baptizer  and  baptized  were  to  fast  previously,  and,  if 
possible,  others  with  them ;  but  in  any  case  the  person  to  be 
baptized  must  fast  beforehand  one  day  or  two.  It  is  evident 
this  chapter  has  been  Christianized  ;  but  the  original  docu 
ment  could  hardly  have  failed  to  contain  in  the  corresponding 
place  instructions  about  baptism,  which  was  a  ceremony  con 
sidered  essential  in  the  admission  of  proselytes.  The  doctrine 
of  the  absolute  necessity  of  the  preliminary  fast  receives  a 
curious  illustration  from  the  pseudo-Clementines.  In  the  part 
of  that  romance  (Recog.  vii.  36;  Horn.  xiii.  u)  which  relates 
the  baptism  of  Clement's  mother,  Peter  directs  that  she  must 
fast  one  day  previously.  She  declares  that  she  has  eaten 
nothing  for  the  last  two  days  (a  fact  to  which  Peter's  wife 
bears  witness),  and  asks  to  be  baptized  at  once.  Peter 
smiles,  and  explains  that  a  fast  made  without  reference  to 
baptism  will  not  count.  She  must  fast  all  that  day  ;  they  will 
all  fast  with  her,  and  then  she  can  be  baptized  the  next  day. 

The  next  chapter  in  the  original  in  all  probability  treated 
of  fasting  and  prayer.  The  Didactic"  here  directs  the  disciple 
to  fast  twice  a-week  ;  but  not  on  Mondays  and  Thursdays, 
like  the  hypocrites,  but  on  Wednesdays  and  Fridays;  and 
to  pray  three  times  a-day  ;  but  instead  of  praying  like  the 
hypocrites,  to  use  the  Lord's  Prayer,  which  is  given  with  the 
doxology.  It  appears  to  me  that  the  adapter  here  designedly 
departed  from  his  original ;  and  that  the  rules  of  fasting  and 
the  prayers  which  he  calls  of  '  the  hypocrites,'  were  those 


XXVI.]  TEACHING   OF   THE   TWELVE   APOSTLES.  623 

which  he  found  in  his  original,  and  for  which  he  substitutes 
purely  Christian  equivalents.  Epiphanius  (Haer.  16)  speaks 
of  the  Monday  and  Thursday  fast  as  a  Pharisaic  institution. 
The  author  of  the  Didactic"  had,  no  doubt,  in  his  mind  our 
Lord's  words,  which  occur  so  often  in  Matt,  xxiii.,  '  Scribes 
and  Pharisees,  hypocrites  !' 

The  ninth  and  tenth  chapters  of  the  Didach6  are  generally 
understood   as  referring  to  the  Eucharist.     I  have  already 
intimated  some  difficulty  as  to  this  view,  and  the  difficulty  is 
increased  by  the  fact  that  the  Eucharist  is  treated  of  in  a  later 
chapter  (14).     Why  should  it  be  treated  of  twice  ?     I  believe 
the  answer  to  be,  that   in  the  corresponding  place  of  the 
original  Jewish  manual  the  proselyte  was  taught  as  the  con 
cluding  piece  of  his  instruction  forms  of  benediction  to  be 
used  before  and  after  solemn  meals.     These  forms,  I  take  it, 
the  compiler  of  the  Didach6  adapted  for  Christian  use,  leaving 
it  free,  however,  to  persons  endowed  with  prophetical  gifts  to 
use  different  forms  if  they  chose.    These  forms  might  be  used 
in  the  Christian  Love  Feasts ;  but  I  do  not  believe  that  the 
Eucharist  proper  is  treated  of  before  the  fourteenth  chapter. 
And,  in  fact,  if  I  am  right  in  my  inference  from  the  '  therefore* 
at  the  beginning  of  chap,  xv.,  the  Didache'  agrees  with  Justin 
Martyr  in  making  consecration  the  office  of  the  president  of 
the  assembly,  and  there  could  be  no  reason  why  formulae  for 
the  purpose  should  be  taught  to  the  ordinary  disciple.      It  is 
true  that  the  word  evxaPtorrt'a  is  here  used  in  the  Didach6,  and 
it  is  ordained  that  no  unbaptized  person  shall  eat  of  it.     Yet 
I  am  disposed  to  believe  the  explanation  to  be,  that  the  word 
Eucharist  had  not  yet  come  to  be  used  exclusively  of  the 
Lord's   Supper.     In   the   Clementines  great   prominence  is 
given  to  Peter's  benediction  of  meals  in  cases,  where  if  an 
administration  of  the  Eucharist,  as  we  understand  the  word, 
be  intended,  Peter  must  have  made  every  meal  a  Eucharist. 
For  example,  Clement,  narrating  his  intercourse  with  Peter, 
previous  to  his  baptism,  says  : — '  And  when  he  had  said  these 
things,  and  had  taken  food,  he  by  himself,  he  commanded 
that  I  also  should  take  food,  and  he  blessed  over  the  food, 
and  gave  thanks  after  he  was  satisfied,*  and  exhorted  me 

*  Compare  ^uera  rb  €fj.ir\ij(rdrivaL  (Didache,  ch.  x.). 


624  NON-CANONICAL   BOOKS.  [XXVI. 

with  a  word  concerning  that  [which  he  had  done] ;  and  after 
these  things  he  said,  God  grant  thee  that  thou  mayest  in 
everything  be  like  unto  me,  and  mayest  be  baptized,  and  this 
same  food  with  me  thou  mayest  receive.'* 

I  do  not  know  whether  the  influence  of  a  Jewish  original 
can  be  traced  beyond  chap.  x.  ;  and  yet  it  is  quite  possible 
that  a  Jewish  manual  might  contain  directions  as  to  the 
reception  of  aTro'crroAot,  there  being  Jewish  officers  so  called, 
as  has  been  already  remarked.  And  if  the  manual  had  con 
tained  orders  as  to  the  payment  of  first-fruits  for  the  support 
of  the  high-priests,  we  could  understand  why  the  Didache,  in 
directing  that  first-fruits  should  be  paid  to  the  prophets,  should 
add,  'for  they  are  j'flwrhigh-priests.'  At  any  rate,  chaps.  xiv.,xv., 
and  the  last  chapter,  on  our  Lord's  Second  Coming,  are  not 
likely  to  have  had  anything  corresponding  in  a  merely  Jewish 
book.  But  there  is  one  passage  about  which  a  few  words 
must  be  said.  I  have  said  that  in  the  section  of  Barnabas  on 
the  'Two  Ways'  there  is  no  use  of  the  Gospels;  but  there  is 
one  passage  which  apparently  exhibits  a  use  of  the  Acts  and 
of  St.  Paul.  Barnabas  says  (ch.  xix.) :  '  Participate  with  your 
neighbour  in  all  things,  and  say  not  that  things  are  your  own  ; 
for  if  you  have  been  participators  in  that  which  is  incorruptible, 
how  much  more  in  corruptible  things.'  The  passage  strongly 
recalls  Rom.  xv.  27,  and  i  Cor.  ix.  u.  But  the  same  words 
are  found  both  in  the  Didach6  and  in  the  *  Church  Ordinances,' 
save  that  instead  of  a^^aprw  we  have  dOavdrio.  If  we  could  take 
the  three  as  independent  witnesses,  it  would  follow  that  there 
must  have  been  corresponding  words  in  the  Jewish  original ; 
and  then  the  question  would  arise  whether  that  original  may 

*  Clem.  Recog.  \.  19,  translated  for  me  from  the  Syriac  by  Dr.  Gwynn. 
The  strongest  evidence  that  Clement  of  Alexandria  knew  the  Palestinian 
form  of  the  Didache  is,  that  he  uses  (Quts  dives  salvus,  20)  the  phrase  'vine 
of  David,'  which  occurs  in  one  of  these  benedictory  prayers.  The  phrase 
itself  we  may  well  believe  occurred  in  the  Jewish  benediction,  and  there 
meant  the  Jewish  people.  And  it  is  possible  that  this  benediction  may 
have  been  copied  into  the  Egyptian  form  of  the  « Apostolic  Teaching.' 
It  is  generally  owned  that  the  latter  part  of  the  '  Church  Ordinances,'  as 
we  have  them,  is  a  later  addition ;  but  in  order  to  make  room  for  that 
addition,  the  'Way  of  Death,'  and  possibly  some  other  portions  of  the 
original  document,  have  been  cut  away.  Bornemann  notices  (Theol. 
Literaturz.  1885,  413)  that  Origen  also  has  'verae  vitis  quae  ascendit  de 
radice  David'  (In  Lib  ruin  jfudicum^  Horn.  6,  xi.  258,  Lommatzsch). 


XXVI.]  TEACHING   OF   THE    TWELVE   APOSTLES.  625 

not  have  been  old  enough  to  have  been  known  to  St.  Paul. 
But  as  there  is  also  what  looks  like  a  use  of  Acts  iv.  32,  the 
passage  can  scarcely  be  pre-Christian  ;  and  I  am  therefore 
disposed  to  believe  that  Barnabas  is  here  the  original.  I 
have  already  come  to  the  conclusion  that  the  Christian 
adapter  of  the  Didache"  had  seen  Barnabas,  and  he  may  have 
made  an  addition  from  that  source.  I  have  not  made  any 
systematic  study  of  the  'Church  Ordinances  ;'  but  I  share 
the  general  belief  that  the  latter  half  is  not  of  the  same  date 
as  the  earlier  portion  ;*  and  the  later  compiler  may  have  been 
acquainted  with  the  Didache\  Some  fuller  account  of  the 
early  use  of  the  Didactic",  and  of  the  literature  to  which  its 
discovery  by  Bryennius  has  given  rise,  will  be  found  in  an 
article  ('  Teaching  of  the  Twelve  Apostles')  which  I  contri 
buted  to  Smith  and  Wace's  Dictionary  of  Christian  Biography. 

*  There  is  in  the  latter  one  very  curious  passage  (§  26),  indicating  jealousy 
of  the  women  on  the  part  of  the  Apostles,  which  I  suspect  owes  its  origin 
to  something  in  the  Gospel  according  to  the  Egyptians.  At  least,  the 
same  feature  shows  itself  in  the  Gnostic  work,  Pistis  Sophia,  which  is  also 
Egyptian.  In  p.  57,  when  Mary,  who  has  already  been  highly  commended 
by  the  Saviour  for  her  previous  answer,  is  about  to  speak,  Peter  leaps 
forward,  and  says  :  '  Lord,  we  cannot  suffer  this  woman  to  take  place  with 
us,  for  she  will  not  allow  any  of  us  to  speak,  but  is  speaking  very  often  ; ' 
and  again,  p.  161,  Mary  says  :  '  I  would  answer,  but  I  am  afraid  of  Peter, 
who  is  threatening  me,  and  who  hates  our  sex.' 


2  S 


INDEX  TO  PERSONS  AND  SUBJECTS. 


Abbot,  Ezra,  Dr.,  62,  72,  75,  78,  85. 
Abbott,  Edwin  A.,  Dr.,  on  fourth 

Gospel,  78;  on  Encratism,   81  ; 

on  Synoptic  Gospels,   143,   147- 

151;  on  2  Peter,  545-559. 
Abgar  legend,  201,  354-7,  522. 
Abraham,  480,  559. 
Acts  of  the  Apostles  :  see  Contents, 

Lecture  xvm. 
Adams,  Professor,  273. 
Addai,  83,  354,  372,  374. 
Adulteress,  pericope  of,  97,  166. 
jEnon,  278. 
African  Church  ;  its  language,  45  ; 

its  version  of  Scripture,  159. 
Africanus,  577. 
Agrippa,  375. 
Alexander,  Syriarch,  360. 
Alexandria,  42,  73,  167,  230,  465, 

571,  572,  602. 

Alexandrian  MS.  :  see  Codex  A. 
Alexandrians,  Epistle  to,  50,  456, 

570. 

Alford,  Dean,  132,  140,  343. 
Alogi,  229. 

Ambrose,  38,  357,  567. 
Amen,  the  Christian,  369. 
Ammonius,  harmony  of,  83,  86. 
Amphilochius,  520. 

74,  310,  557. 
,  439. 

Anastasius  Sinaita,  272. 
Anatolius,  527. 
Ancyra,  410,  412. 
Andrew,  Acts  of,  372,  378. 

2 


Anencletus,  575. 

Anger,  109,  184. 

Anicetus,  268. 

Anne,  mother  of  Virgin,  193. 

'Aj/o/^ia,  21. 

Antitheses  of  Mar  don,  204. 

Apelles,  Gnostic,  177. 

Apocalypse  of  John,  88,  219,  223, 
526 ;  rejected  by  Caius,  53  ;  its 
use  of  our  Lord's  words,  221 ;  its 
use  of  Daniel,  604  sqq.  ;  see  Con 
tents,  Lectures  in.,  xn.,  xin., 
XIV. 

of  Peter,  225,  560-4,  573. 

of  Baruch,  226. 

of  Paul,  564. 

Apocalyptic  prediction,  400. 

Apocrypha,  Jewish,  525,  563. 

Apocryphal  Gospels,  35,  119,  165, 
Lecture  xi. 

Acts,  Lecture  Xix. 

Apollinaris  of  Hierapolis,  271, 
272. 

of  Laodicea,  320,  526. 

ApoUonius,  365. 

Apollos,  74,  465.  469. 

Apologies,  do  not  quote  N.T.,  44. 

Apostle,  name  not  limited  to  the 
Twelve,  291,  405,  613,  624; 
name  pre-eminently  given  to 
Paul,  404 ;  as  title  of  our  Lord, 

454- 

Apostles,  false,  31. 
Apostolic  Church   Ordinances,  610 

sqq. 
S  2 


628 


INDEX   TO    PERSONS   AND    SUBJECTS. 


Apostolic   Constitutions,    368,    527, 
577,  609  sqq. 

Aquila  and  Priscilla,  499. 

Aquila,  translator  O.T.,  595-599- 

Arabia,  71. 

Aramaic,  117,  141,  154,  165,  174. 

Archippus,  417,  418. 

'Ape-Hj,  547,  555- 

Aringhi,  377. 

Aristarchus,  396,  417,  448- 

Aristion,  91,   103,  288. 

Arnold,  245. 

Arnold,  Matthew,  62. 

Artemon,  56. 

Artlessness  of  Synoptics,  311. 

Ascension  of  our  Lord  ;  believed  by 
early  Church,  163;  recognized  in 
fourth  Gospel,  300,  311  ;  in  the 
Apocalypse,  311  ;  previous  rela 
tion  of,  known  to  St.  John,  313. 

Asceticism,  202,  282. 

Assumption  B.  V.  M.,  384,  386. 

— . of  Moses,  526. 

Athanasius,  272,  456,  520,  533, 
581,  609,  622. 

Pseudo-,  293,  526. 

Athenagoras,  79. 

Athens,  Paul's  speech  at,  342. 

Augustine,  38,  in,  126,  154,  178, 
212,  357,  365,  383,  458,  517, 
526,  527,  564. 

Autoptic  touches  in  St.  Mark,  153, 
154  ;  in  fourth  Gospel,  286. 

Babooism,  545,  546,  552. 
Babylon,  the  name  how  used,  481, 

482. 

Baethgen,  84. 
Balaam,  alleged  nickname  for  St. 

Paul,  27. 
Baptism,  precept   of,   not  directly 

mentioned  by  St.  John,  310;  St. 

John  and  Justin,  74  ;  female,  357; 

lay,  360  ;  Gnostic  administration 

of,  368 ;  rules  for,  in  the  Didache, 

611,  622. 


Baptism  of  our  Lord,  175,  180. 

Barcochba,  281,  518. 

Bardenhewer,  600. 

Barnabas,  330,  332,  334,  457,  458; 
his  claim  to  authorship  of  Epistle 
to  the  Hebrews,  465-471. 

—  Epistle  of,  107,  404,  457, 


493,  535,  56°,  S65~572 ;  and  the 
Didache,  611  sqq.  Whether  the 
author  was  a  Jew,  569,  618. 

Bar  Salibi,  84,  86,  228. 

Bartholomew,  167. 

Baruch,  Book  of,  606. 

Apocalypse  of,  226. 

Basil,  414,  530. 

Basilides,   58,  61,    104,    435,    477, 

532. 
Baur,  13  ;  his  Canon,  23,  123,  212, 

218,  220,  221,  263,  294,  321,  330, 

341 ;  on  Mark,  154  ;  on  the  Acts, 
294,  403  ;  on  Paschal  disputes, 
263,  267-270;  on  Pauline  Epis 
tles,  387,  397,  415,  419,  425,  434. 

Baur's  theory  of  early  Church  His 
tory,  Lect.  ii.,  330-6,  341,  373, 
387,  462,  480,  489,  507. 

Beast,  of  Apocalypse,  26,  224,  253 
sqq. 

Beasts,  four,  38. 

miracles  on,  in  Gnostic  Acts, 

370,  380. 

Bede,  515. 

Bel  and  the  Dragon,  179,  516,  603. 

Senary,  246. 

Bentley,  5,  7,  I&3- 

Bercea,  1 68. 

Bickell,  607. 

Birthplace  of  our  Lord,  297. 

Bishops  and  Deacons,  415,  613. 

Blastus,  272. 

Boanerges,  79,  93. 

Bonnet,  352. 

Borghesi,  64. 

Bornemann,  624. 

Borrowing,  literary,  133,  259,  542. 

Boycotting,  252. 


INDEX   TO    PERSONS   AND   SUBJECTS. 


629 


Brandes,  564. 

Brethren  of  our  Lord,  195,  522. 

Brindley,  427. 

Bruce,  527. 

Bryennius,  578,  609,  612-621. 

Bugs,  story  of,  380. 

Bunsen,  50,  558,  564. 

Bunyan,  583. 

Burgon,  Dean,  87,  158. 

Byrrhus,  383. 

Byzantium,  378. 

Caiaphas,  277,  281. 

6rt/«j,  of  Rome,   51-57,   227-229, 

339,  377,  456,  484- 
Caius,  of  3rd  John,  293. 
Caligula,  253,  482. 
Calvin,  253,453,460,531. 
Canon,  how  formed,  120-127,  192, 

516-518,    529,    530,    541,     566, 

597,  577- 
Carpocrates,  524. 
Carthage,  Council  of,  459,  541. 
Caspari,  274. 

Cassiodorus,  493,  532,  534. 
Catacombs,  377- 
Catholic  Church,  2O,  428-431. 

Epistles,  492,  578. 

Cave,   our  Lord's  birth   in  a,    71, 

194. 

Celtic  characteristics,  412. 
C?£rwj,  158. 
Cephas,  300,  610. 
Ceriani,  226,  526. 
Cerinthus,  27,  227-229. 
Chagigah,  265. 
Chase,  251. 

Cherubim  and  the  Gospels,  38. 
Chigi  Version  of  Daniel,  597,  j^. 
Chiliasm,  225-231. 
Christology,  of  fourth  Gospel,  215; 

of  Synoptic    Gospels,     217;    of 

Apocalypse,  219-223,  235,  433; 

of  St.  Paul,  221,  420,  433  ;  of  St. 

James,  512. 
Chrysostom,  264,  357,  443,  530. 


Church  (see  Catholic}. 

Church  Ordinances,  610,  J^. 

Czojttz,  86. 

Circuits  of  Peter,  372. 

Circumcision,  a  title  of  honour  with 

St.  Paul,  30,  569  ;  short  duration 

of  controversy  concerning,  403. 
Claudia,  450. 
Clement,  of  the  Epistle  to  thePhilip- 

pians,  345,  575. 
Clement  of  Alexandria,  41,  81,  167, 

177,560. 
his  notices  of  the  Gospels, 

93,  1 10,  264,  483,497. 

of  other  parts  ofN.  T.  212, 


339,454,478,493,  SI9. 

of  uncanonical  writings,  177, 


196,  201,365,373,526,527,560, 

565,  573,  579,  6oo>  6l°>  624- 

of  heretical    writings,    41, 


61,  203,  371,  421,  477,  532. 
Clement,  Irenceus,  and  Tertullian, 

35»  2II>  3*7,  390,  40!,  423,  477- 

Clement  of  Rome,  572-9,  20,  32, 
88,  106,  318,  336,  391,  404,  423, 
434,  443,  449,  453,  459,  476,  477, 
485,  495,  538,  556,  5°3>  592,  607, 
614. 

his  second  Epistle,  so-called, 

578,  203,  423,  433,  538. 

Clementines,  Pseudo-,  14-19,76,  77, 
373-375,  80,  174,  365,  468,  480, 
496,  518,  527,  536,  616,  622  ; 
their  N.  T.  quotations,  176,  177. 

Codex*,  70,  108, 159,  305,  316,  414, 

533,  563,  5^5,  58i. 

A,  556,  563,  573,  578. 

3,70,159-161,305,316,317, 

414,  459,  533- 

C,  224,  316. 

D,  323- 

L,  163. 

Amiatinus,  383. 

Augiensis,  474. 

Aureus,  383. 

Baroccianus,  319. 


630 


INDEX   TO   PERSONS   AND   SUBJECTS. 


Codex  Cheltoniensis,  559. 
-    Chisianus,  597. 


563,  581- 
Coincidences,  John  and  Synoptics, 

312. 

--  John  and  Paul,  433. 
--   Acts  and  Epistles,  342  , 

347,  490. 

--  Peter  and  Paul,  486. 
--  Peter  and  James,  489. 
--  Peter  and  John,  236. 
Luke    and    Josephus, 

2  Peter  and  Josephus, 
N.  T.  andPhilo,  557, 

St.  John  and   Theo- 
dotion,  603-606. 

Barnabas  andDidache, 


350,  351- 
547-556. 


558. 


618. 

Colossians,  221,  416-423. 

Commentary,  earliest  N.  T.,  61. 

Conflation,  140,  600. 

Constantine,  161,  378. 

Contradictions  between  fourth  Gos 
pel  and  Synoptics,  296 ;  do  not 
disprove  early  date,  265. 

Controversies,  dying  out  of,  428-429. 

Conybeare,  389. 

Cook,  Canon,  161,  345. 

Corinth,  Church  of,  392,  572. 

Corinthians,  Epistles  to,  409. 

Corrections  of  N.  T.  text  in  third 
century,  56. 

Cotterill,  Mr.,  556. 

Cross,  foretold  in  Isaiah,  619; 
Gnostic  cult  of,  380. 

Cross-references  in  Acts,  325. 

Crown  of  Life,  221,  501. 

Cumming,  Dr.,  250. 

Cureton,  84,  158-9,  189. 

Cyprian,  158,  377,  534,  559,  600. 

Pseudo,  373,  620. 

Cyprus,  347,  467. 


Cyrenius,  70. 

Cyril  of  Alexandria,  158,515. 

of  Jerusalem,  158,  367,  533. 

Cythnos,  244. 

Damasus,  378,  522. 

Daniel,  218,  400,  594-606. 

Dante,  369. 

Darwin,  442. 

Dathan  and  Abiram,  5/6. 

David,  Son  of,  219. 

Davidson,  Dr.,  7,  237,  210,  238, 
248,  3*7,  320,  326,  329,  335,  342, 
387,  398,  399,  4J5>  417,  421,  425> 
429,  439,  445,  453,  534,  544. 

Dead,  Prayers  for,  360. 

De  Boor,  319. 

Decretal  Epistles,  7,  280. 

Demas,  358,  417,  448. 

Demetrius,  295. 

De  Morgan,  Professor,  273. 

Dereribourg,  502. 

De  Rossi,  378. 

Derry,  Bishop  of,  209,  415. 

Des  Cartes,  82. 

Development  of  Doctrine,  422,  511. 

De  Wette,  297,  329,  425. 

Diatessaron,  80,  82-87,  357. 

Dictionary,  Christian  Biography, 
48,  52,  62,  200,  590,  625. 

Didache,  291,  514,  608-625. 

Didymus,  520,  526,  532. 

Dillmann,  527. 

Diodorus,  87. 

Dionysius  of  Alexandria,  25,  224- 
235,  288,  476. 

of  Corinth,  85,  225,  318, 


391,  484,  572-573- 

Bar  Salibi,  84,  86,  228. 

Diotrephes,  291-293. 

Discourses  of  'our  Lord,  unique,  113. 

Dismas  and  Gestas,  20 1. 

Dispersion,  277,  498. 

Divinity  of  our  Lord,  taught  by  St. 
John,  215-222  ;  asserted  by  Him 
self,  2 1 6,  308. 


INDEX   TO    PERSONS   AND   SUBJECTS. 


Docetism,  195,  197,  282,  283,  293, 

363,  370,  379- 
Doddridge,  Dr.,  586. 
'  Do'/nine  quo  vadis,"1  376. 
Domitian,  215,  243,  255. 
Donaldson ,  582. 
Dressd,  76. 
Drummond,  74,  78. 
Ducange,  368. 
Duchesne,  377. 

Easter  Controversies,  266-272. 

Ebed  Je:u,  530. 

Ebionites,  14,  76,  616 ;  meaning  of 
word,  173,  502;  two  kinds,  18  ; 
their  Gospel,  169,  172;  their  re 
jection  of  Paul,  16;  their  Acts, 
372  ;  opposed  by  St.  John,  382. 

Edersheim,  264. 

Edessa,  16,  82,  354,  364,  372. 

Edinburgh  Review,  245,  249. 

Egyptians,  Gospel  according  to,  41, 
202,  203,  625. 

Eichhom,  146. 

Eleutherus,  422. 

Elkesai,  19,  173,  332,  372,  422, 
614. 

Ellicott,  Bishop,  389. 

Encratism,  81,  202-204,  354,  358, 
361,  362,  371,  380,  435. 

Enoch,  520,  527,  528. 

Eothen,  324. 

Epaphras,  417. 

Epaphroditus,  345,  415. 

Ephesians,  Epistle  to,  59,  403,414, 

423-433»  564- 
Ephesus,  26,  31,  73,  232,  241,  338, 

384,  418,  440,  444,  499- 
Ephraem  Syrus,  83-86,  228,   231, 

290,  477,  496,  520. 
'Evlyvoxris,  439. 
'Eiriovffios,  144,  l8l. 
Epiphanius,  168,  1 6,  148,  172-176, 

195,  196,  200,  205,  228,  229,  248, 

357, 383,  522,  S32,  564»  572,  597- 

599,  623. 


63, 


a,  439- 
Episcopacy,  293,  415,  430,  449,  572, 

575,  591. 
Episemon,  253. 
Erasmus,  453,  531. 
Esdras,  Book  of,  603. 
Essenes,  18. 
Eucharist,  institution  of,  346  ;  not 

recorded  by  St.  John,  297,  306  ; 

Christian  belief  in,  309,  615,  623  ; 

evidential   value    of,    309,    310; 

Gnostic  rites,  369. 
Eusebius,  his  principle  of  selection 

of  testimonies  to  the  Canonical 

Scriptures,  51,  89. 

-  whether  an  argument  can 
be  founded  on  his   silence,    89, 

95- 

-  his  classification  of  books, 
228,  475,  495,  529,  562,  572,  578, 
609. 

-  his  discovery    of    'John 
the  Elder,'  288. 

-  For  authors   quoted    by 
him,  see  under  their   respective 
names. 

Evodius,  526. 
E-wald,  445. 
'E£epana,  530. 
"E|o5os,  536,  554. 
Eznig,  477. 


Fabricius,  352,  373. 

Farrar,  Archdeacon,  245-249,  252, 

254,  389,  548-555- 
Fasting,  622. 
Feasts,  Jewish,  in  fourth  Gospel, 

276. 

Firmilian,  421,  534- 
FitzGerald,  Bishop,  69,  175,   253, 

345,  549- 
Florinus,  37. 

forgery,  58,  291,  388,  427,  540. 
Four  Beasts,  38. 
Friend  of  God,  495. 


632 


INDEX   TO    PERSONS   AND   SUBJECTS. 


Fritzsche,  226,  246,  526. 
Furneaux,  5. 

Gains  :  see  Caius. 

Galatians,  Epistle  to,  16,  23,  334, 
345,403-413,  5io. 

Galen,  83,  351. 

Galilee,  151,  152,  188,  278,  279. 

Gamaliel,  326,  374. 

Gardiner,  Col.,  586. 

Garrett,  Mr.,  528. 

Gebhardt,  91,  619. 

Gelasius,  Pope,  522. 

ofCyzicus,  526. 

Genealogies  omitted  by  Tatian,  83. 

Gentiles,  their  admission  into  the 
Church,  334,  428,  429,  617. 

Georgius  Hamartolus,  319. 

Gieseler,  212. 

Glaucias,  532. 

Gnosis,  435,  566. 

Gnosticism,  date  of  commencement, 
420-423  ;  two  types  of,  362,  524  ; 
use  of  St.  John's  Gospel,  79; 
the  claim  to  possess  secret  tradi 
tions,  268  ;  their  ritual,  367  ;  cult 
of  cross,  380 ;  Acts,  353,  363  ; 
and  miracles,  380;  tale  about 
Hades,  477  ;  story  of  death  of 
Zacharias,  196. 

Gobar,  Stephen,  457. 

Godet,  155,  254. 

Gospels,  why  four,  37,  38  ;  meaning 
of  word,  123;  'according  to,' 
109;  lost  Gospel,  67;  genesis  of, 
128-130;  their  publication  pre 
historic,  122;  order  of  publica 
tion,  41,  no;  fifth  Gospel,  178 
(see  Apocryphal). 

Grabe,  373. 

Grapte,  587. 

Greek,  the  language  of  Early  Roman 
Church,  45,  55  ;  whether  spoken 
in  Holy  Land,  187;  of  New  Tes 
tament,  239,  508,  546,  606. 

Gregory  the  Great,  3/8. 


Gregory,  Nazianzen,  357. 
-   Nyssen,  195,  357. 
Grotius,  398,  539. 
Gundephorus,  365. 
Gutschmid,  362,  365. 
Gwynn,    Dr.,    53,    228,    305,   349, 

415,  439,  538,  549-557  ;  5S7~6o6, 

624. 

Hades,  200,  356,  477,  478. 
Hadrian,  281,  319,  421,  518,  571. 
Hapax  legomena,  543,  550,  555. 
Harmony  of  Gospels,  82-86,  103. 
Harnack,    85,   91,    105,    255,  319, 

468>  559,  °0r,  609,  616,  620. 
Harris,  Rendel,  563,  594. 
Hatch,  Dr.,  614. 
Hausrath,  445. 
Hebrew,  alleged  original  language 

of  St.  Matthew,  92,  93,  141,  165- 

190;    words    preserved  by    St. 

Mark  only,  70. 
Hebrews,  Gospel  according  to,Lect. 

x.,  165-190. 
Epistle    to,    Lect.   xxi., 

453-473,  51,  88,  344,  508,  540, 

558,  580,  595- 
Hegesippus,   50,  87,  186,  421,  422, 

434,  497,   5°3,    52I>   525>   573> 

574- 
Helena,  Empress,  356. 

harlot,  374. 

Hell,  harrowing  of :  see  Hades. 

Hemphill,  86. 

Heracleon,  6l,  82,  371,  373. 

Heretic,  437. 

Heretical    testimony    to    Gospels, 

58. 

Gospels,  202-208. 

Hermas,  579-606,  49,  52,   89,   113, 

318,  433,  458,476,478,494,538, 

562,  565,  609,  6n,  616,  620. 
Hermathena,  52,  53,  601. 
Hermogenes,  358. 
Herodotus,  368,  419. 
Heumann,  254. 


INDEX   TO   PERSONS   AND   SUBJECTS. 


633 


Hilgenfeld,  70,  77,  102,  107,  108, 
179,  1 86,  192,  196,221,304,350, 

373,  387,  393,  399,  4'5,  427,  453, 

488,  526,  534,  564,  623. 
Hippocrates,  351. 
Hippolytus,    57-63,    590,    79,   160, 

199,  201,  203,  228,  229,  230,  264, 

272,  273,  374,  376,  432,  457,  496, 

537,  564,  6o°- 
Hitzig,  246. 
Hobart,  Dr.,  143,  351. 
Hobbes,  301. 
Holsten,  396,  595. 
Holtzmann,  350,  426,  427,  486. 
Holy  Ghost,  the  name  feminine  in 

Aramaic,  179. 
Hone,  191. 

Hooykaas,  Dr.,  295,  321,  322. 
Hope,  Apostle  of,  491. 
Hort,  Dr.,  46,  62,  64,  158,  164,414, 

467,  544,  594,  6o°- 
Hospitality  of  Christians,  282. 
Howson,  Dean,  389. 
Hug,  212,  497. 
Hugo,  Victor,  247,  434. 
Hystaspes,  373. 

Iconium,  349,  358,  411. 
Iconoclasts,  379. 

Ignatius,  20,    1 06,    185,    1 86,   308, 
318,391,401,423,  572,574,609. 
Inaccuracy  of  quotations,  69,  133. 
Infancy  of  our  Lord,  67. 
Inspiration  of  Scripture,  2,   3,  37, 

55,  I26,  5*7,  528,  567- 

Irenceus,  36-40,  49,  55,  65,  79,  80, 
89,  92,  99,  105,  no,  158,  167, 
199,  202,  224,  231,  243,  248,  254, 
268,  288,  290,  369,  374,  395,  432, 
457,  478,  527,  536,  567,  574,  575, 
598,  599,  621. 

Irenceus,  Clement,  and  Tertullian, 
35,  211,  317,401,416,423,  434, 

477- 

Irish  Revisers  C,  P.,  75. 
Irony  of  St.  John,  302. 


James,  the  Lord's  Brother,  178,  346, 

497,  501,  S"»  52i. 

Epistle  of,  Lect.  xxm. 

and    Shepherd     of 

Hermas,  593. 

Gospel  of,  119,  193-19  6. 


James,  grandson  of  Jude,  521. 

Jason,  396. 

Jeremiah,  Pseudo-,  478. 

Jerome,  38,  54,  86,  126,  168,  171, 
177-186,  196,  228,  290,  340,  354, 
36o,  369,  381,  382,  393,  403,  435, 
458,492,517,  520,522,523,529- 
53i,  534,  543-545,  5^6,  573- 

Pseudo-,  354,  532. 

Jerusalem,  how  often  visited  by  our 
Lord,  314-316;  its  Church,  422; 
its  bishop,  497,  523 ;  Apostles 
ordered  not  to  leave,  365. 

Jesus  Justus,  417. 

Jewish  Christians  fraternized  with 
unconverted  brethren,  269,  569. 

Jewish  hostility  to  Christians,  31, 

519. 

Jews,  the  phrase,  23,  277,  397,  569. 

its  use  by  St.  Paul,  30. 

Joachim,  193. 

John  the  Baptist,  208,  285,  300, 374. 

John  the  Apostle,  character  of,  27  ; 
not  mentioned  in  fourth  Gospel, 
62,  289;  whether  visited  Asia, 
290 ;  whether  visited  Rome,  255, 
294  ;  knew  of  other  Gospels,  266, 
300-306  ;  story  of  his  death,  318, 
383  ;  his  two  tombs,  384 ;  John 
and  the  Robber,  379  ;  John  and 
Peter,  213,  294. 

John,  Gospel  according  to :  see 
Lects.  Xli.-xvil.,  569. 

the  First  Epistle,  209-212, 


544- 


the  Second  and  Third  Epis 


tles,  290-295,  353. 

Acts  of,  378-384. 


John  the  Elder,  91,  231,  232,  287- 
290. 


634 


INDEX   TO    PERSONS   AND   SUBJECTS. 


John  Mark,  232. 
Jortin,  192. 

Josephus,  141,  187,  189,   246,  264 
267,  275,  277,280,350,351,481 
482,  498,  536,  547-556,  561. 
Judas  Iscariot,  313,  316,  319. 

-  Thomas,  355,  364-372,  522 
Jude,  Epistle  of,  Lect.  xxiv. 
Judith,  305. 
Julian,  Emperor,  515. 

-  the  Pelagian,  178. 
Julius  Africanus,  577. 
June  2g,  376. 
Junilius,  530. 

Justin  Martyr,  64-80,  r  6,  93,  102, 
II0,  IJ9,  IS5-I59,  196,  199,  200, 
201,  224,258,  281,309,311,  369, 
373,  374,  392-395>  401,  416,  422, 
434,  454,  478,  498,  514,  518,  527, 
535,  537,  600,  623. 
Justus  Bar  sab  as,  318,  382. 
Juvenal,^,  514. 


,  498. 
fable,  231,  567. 
Keim,  184,  290,  480. 
Kerioth,  316. 
Kihn,  530. 
Klostermann,  155. 
K.oifj.-r)(ns,  384. 
K6tyivoi,  312. 
Kra-wutzcky,  6  1  2-6  1  6. 
Krenkel,  351. 
z,  294. 


Lachmann,  164. 

Lactantitis,  373,  619. 

Lamb,  as  title  of  our  Lord,   235, 

256. 
Laodicea,  Paschal  disputes  at,  271, 

272. 

-   Council  of,  541. 
Laodiceans,   Epistle    to,   205,  402, 

403,  414,  418. 

Latin  Translation  N.  T.,  42,  44-47. 
Laud,  Archbishop,  253. 


Laurence,  Archbishop,  527. 
Lazarus,  raising  of,  315. 
Leathes,  Dr.  Stanley,  238. 
Lee,  Archdeacon,  220. 

Bishop,  181. 

Lekebusch,  342. 

Leucius  Charinus,  248,  363,  378- 

383,  386. 
Leusden,  543. 
Lewin,  Mr.,  389. 
Lias,  222. 
Lightfoot,  10,  389. 

Commentaries,     1 8,     90, 

293,  4°3,  421,  427,  522,589,614. 

Contemporary  Review,  9, 

84,   88,  90,   102,  103,   105,   108, 
211,319,  348. 

Ignatius,  186,  478,  480. 

Other  -writings,  97,  181, 

318,  414,  485,  565,  589,  590. 

Linus,  449,  575. 

Lipsius,  352,  36,  148,  184,  200,  229, 
357,  378,386,468,482,560,  589. 

Liturgical  use  of  Gospels,  94. 

Liturgy  of  Rome,  45,  575. 

Lima,  375. 

Logia  of  St.  Matthew,  95-103. 

Logos,  43,  72,  73,  80,  Si,  207,  235, 
284,  309,  420. 

Loman,  387. 

Longinus,  69. 

soldier,  201. 

Lost  Gospel,  67. 

Epistles,  402. 

Lots,  drawn  by  Apostles,  364. 

Lucian,  461,  556. 

Lucifer  of  Cagliari,  520,  525. 

Luke,  his  literary  skill,  327  ;  his 
medical  knowledge,  143;  his  prin 
ciples  of  selection,  338  ;  Luke  and 
Philip,  338-340 ;  Luke  and  Jose- 
phus,  350;  his  means  of  informa 
tion,  340,  341  ;  shows  no  know 
ledge  of  Paul's  Epistles,  344-347 ; 
not  named  in  MSS.  as  author  of 
Acts,  322. 


INDEX  TO  PERSONS  AND  SUBJECTS. 


635 


Luke's  Gospel,  not  anti-Jewish,  22  ; 

whether  known  to  Papias,  101. 
Lumby,  Dr.,  542,  545,  558. 
Luther,  249,  453,  460,  465,  506. 
Lyons,  417. 
Lydia,  344,  415. 
Lyons :  see  Vienne, 

Macarius  Magnes,  163,  477,  561. 

Macedonian  Churches,  foundation 
of,  405- 

M'Clellan,  Mr.,  264,  273. 

Mahaffy,  Professor,  82,  133,  419. 

Mahomet,  253. 

Mai,  181. 

Maitland,  588. 

Malchion,  519. 

Manaimus,  319. 

Afanasses,  Prayer  of,  576. 

Manichczans,  363,  364. 

Man  of  Sin,  399,  401. 

Marcion,  16,  19,  46,  60,  80,  204- 
208,  318,  390,  401,  403,  414,  423, 
457,  570,  593. 

Marcus,  heretic,  369  ;  Marcosians, 
600. 

Mark's  Gospel,  not  an  abridgment, 
of  Matthew's,  154  ;  said  to  have 
been  composed  at  Rome,  163; 
its  relation  to  Peter,  70,  92,  93, 
109,  153,483;  its  Aramaic  words, 
70,  154;  its  supposed  original,  95 ; 
closest  of  the  Synoptics  to  its  ori 
ginal,  148  ;  its  autoptic  touches, 
153,  154  ;  tradition  as  to  its  com 
position,  no,  483;  its  accuracy 
asserted  by  Papias,  100. 

Last  twelve  verses  of, 

156-164. 

Marsh,  Bishop,  146. 

Martial,  450. 

Martin  of  Tours,  8. 

Martyrdom  of  Paul,  336,  377  ;  of 
Peter,  484;  of  other  Apostles, 
371. 

Mary  Magdalene,  313. 


Massoretic  text,  55. 

Mas  suet,  46. 

Matthew,  Pseudo-,  197. 

Matthew 's  Gospel,  not  anti-Pauline, 

22  ;  independent  of  Luke's,   139  ; 

its  supposed  original,  95 ;  whether 

written  in  Hebrew,  Lect.  X. 
Matthias,  41,  4/6. 
Mayerhoff,  426. 
Mel 'ito  of  Sard 'is,  271-273,  371,  386. 

Pseudo-,  354. 

Memoriter  quotations,  69,  107. 

Menander,  heretic,  366,  375. 

Methodius,  357,  393,  561. 

Meyer,  140. 

Michael,  Archangel,  525. 

Michaelis,  146. 

Milan,  48,  468. 

Miletus,  342. 

Millen  n  a  ria  n  ism ,  226-231. 

Minucius  Felix,  537. 

Miracles,  5-13,  79,  149,  328,  354. 

Missions,    Apostolic,    differ    from 

modern,  124. 
Mixed  Chalice,  369. 
Mot 'singer,  85. 
Mommsen,  377  559. 
Money-changers,  be  ye  good,  18, 1 7  7> 

185,  388. 
Montanism,    51,   52,   79,  231,  457, 

579,  590-593- 

Morality,  Christian,  513-515. 
Moses,  Assumption  of,  526. 
Law  of,  204,  403,  429,  504- 

5°7,  569. 

Muratorian  Fragment,  48-55 ,  590, 
211,  225,  317,  336,  338,  381,  401- 
4°3» 423,  434, 443.  45^,  4/8,  496, 

5!9,  534,  56o>  579-582,  589-59i. 
Murphy,  Mr.  J.  J.,  222. 

Nazarenes,  173,  176. 

Neander,  421,601. 

Nepos,  231. 

Nero,  243-255,  261,  375,  443. 

Neubauer,  188. 


636 


INDEX  TO  PERSONS  AND  SUBJECTS. 


Nicaea,  Council  of  ,  191,  192. 

Second  Council  of,  379. 

Nicephorus,  178,  199,  355,  363,  526, 

555-557,  563,  573,  609. 
Nicholson,  177,  186. 
Nicodemus,  75,  298,  311. 

—  Gospel    of,     119,    200, 

356. 

Nicolaus,  27. 
Noeldechen,  60 1. 
Nolte,  319. 

<9;7,  367,  382. 

Old  Testament,   Gnostic  opposition 

to,  282. 

Olshausen,  548. 
Omissions  of  fourth    Gospel,    62, 

297-316. 
Onestm us,  417- 
Onesiphorus,  358,  437,  450. 
tf^ifej,  433. 
Origen,  49,  60,  173,  179,  181,  182, 

1 86,  196,  197,  199,  230,290,319, 

364,  373,  378,  414,  455.  4<H,493> 
519,  522,  525,  533,  537, 566,  575, 
579,  587,599,  603,  611,  624. 

Otho,  571. 

Otto,  371,  394. 

Overbeck,  329,  599,  600. 

Palestine,  known  to  fourth  Evange 
list,  278  ;  language  of,  187. 

Paley,  18,  48,  388,  425,  462. 

Palmer,  Archdeacon,  619. 

Pamphilus,  1 68. 

Pantcenus,  41,  167,  187,  454. 

Papias,  62,  80,  87-105,  109,  117, 
121,  153,  158,  165,170,187,  190, 
211,  214,  224,  225,  288,  318,  339, 
382,  477,  483. 

Papylus,  90. 

Parallel  between  Peter   and  Paul, 

335- 

Parnell,  252. 
Parthia,  245. 
Parthians,  Epistle  to,  212. 


Paschal  Chronicle,  90,  264,  271, 
272,  598. 

Controversies,  266-273. 

Passion,  date  of,  200,  273. 
Passover,  whether    eaten   at   Last 

Supper,  263-265,  273-275. 

Pastor,  580. 

Pastoral  Epistles,  205,  359,  433- 
452,  576. 

Patara,  393. 

Paul,  his  personal  appearance,  359 ; 
report  of  his  speeches  in  the 
Acts,  342-344,  440;  whether 
released  from  Roman  imprison 
ment,  410;  observed  Jewish  in 
stitutions,  269  ;  martyrdom,  day 
of,  377 ;  Apocalypse  of,  564 ; 
Paul  and  Simon  Magus,  15-19, 
373  ;  and  John,  222  ;  and  Peter, 
335,  575  5  and  Barnabas,  466, 
568. 

Paul  of  Nis ibis,  530. 

Pauline  Epistles,  33,  387-452,  578; 
whether  known  to  Luke,  344- 

347- 

Paulinism  of  Apocalypse,  26-32, 
222,  223  ;  of  Peter,  480. 

Paulinists  andanti-Paulinists :  see 
Baur's  theory. 

Paulus,  10,  149. 

Pearce,  Bishop,  69. 

Peregrinus,  461,  556. 

Perpetua,  45. 

Peshitto,  158,  228,  290,  456,  499, 
520,  528,  530. 

Petavius,  597. 

Peter  of  Alexandria,  195. 

Peter  the  Apostle,  his  character, 
481  ;  his  speeches  reported  in  the 
Acts,  347,  545;  his  Roman  Epis 
copate,  15  ;  his  martyrdom,  294; 
377,  484;  Peter  and  Mark,  93, 
152,  153,  483;  and  Paul,  335, 
575  I  legends  of,  622,  625. 

The  First  Epistle,  92,    Lect. 

XXII. 


INDEX   TO   PERSONS   AND   SUBJECTS. 


637 


Peter  the  Apostle,  TheSecondEpistle, 
28,  389,  390,  478,  Lect.  xxv. 

Gospel  acco  rding  to,  195,  476, 

522,  562. 

Acts  of,  3/2-378,  562. 

Apocalypse  of,  225,  493,  560- 

564- 

Judgment  of,  6 1 1 . 

Preaching  of,    19,    1 86,  365, 

373,  562. 

Pfaff,  621. 

Pfleiderer,  223,  415,  445,  480. 

Pharisees,  in  Acts,  230,  325. 

Philaster,  148,  228,  369. 

Philemon,  221,  417,  426. 

Philip,    298,     318,    338-340,    371- 

Acts  of,  372. 

Philip  of  Side,  319,  521. 
Philippi,  269,  349. 
Philippians,  Epistle  to,  415. 
Phillips,  Dr.,  83,  356. 

Philo,  73,  99,  264,  481,  495,  536, 
538 ;  his  influence  on  N.  T. 
Greek,  552-558. 

Philoxenus,  528. 

Photius,  363,   178,  369,  394,  457, 

493,534,  556,  573- 
Phrynichus,  143. 
Picture  of  our  Lord,  356. 

of  Apostle  John,  379. 

Pilate,  Acts  of,  119,  200. 

Pistis  Sophia,  381,  563,  625. 

Pitra,  394. 

Pius  I.  of  Rome,  49,  580,  582,  589. 

Pliny,  348,  349,  479,  514. 

Plumptre,  264,  464. 

Pococke,  528. 

Poison,  318,  382. 

Polemo,  362. 

Polycarp,  20,  31,  36,   39,    79,    106, 

211,268,  290,  318,  391,401,424, 

434,  454,  477,  574,  6°9- 
Polycarpus,  528. 
Polycrates,  272,  339,  572. 
Porphyry,  7,  163,  203,  231. 
Pothinus,  36. 


Preaching  Christ,  112,  115. 

Proclus,  339. 

Proconsuls,  347. 

Prophecy,  interpretation  of,  250. 

Prophet,   False,  of  Revelation,  26,. 

246-248,  252. 

Protevangelium,  193—196,  522. 
Protonice,  356. 
Prudentius,  376,  567. 
Pudens,  450. 
Ptirists,  239. 
Pusey,  597. 

Quadratus,  319. 
(^arry,  Dr.,  82,  485,  537,  549. 
Quartodecimans,  79,  262-273. 
Quotations,  O,  T.,  69,  145,  544. 

Rahab,  508. 

Ramathaim,  316. 

Raphael,  194. 

Reeves,  Bishop,  357. 

Regeneration,  74,  3 10,  557. 

Ttozarc,  8,  24,  27,  77,  79,  96,  97,  100, 
109,  113,  125,  153,  184,189,  198, 
200,  212,  218,  235,  243-245,  252, 
275,  278,  294,  297-303,  305,306, 
311,316,  317,  328,359,  387,  412, 
4J3>  4J5,  4*7,  423,  424,  433,  443, 
452,  503,  523- 

Resurrection,  33,  326,  358,  393. 

Reuss,  137,  246,  415,  441. 

Revelation  :  see  Apocalypse. 

Rhoda,  583,  585. 

Roberts,  188. 

Romans,  Epistle  to,  407-410;  its 
conclusion,  48,  304,  413  ;  its  use 
in  Hebrews,  463 ;  in  I  Peter, 
486  ;  whether  in  James,  509. 

Rome,Church of,  572-577, 59O~593- 

Rbnsch,  42. 

Routh,  91,  104,  320,  549,  577. 

Royal  Law,  494. 

Rufinus,  15,  372,  493,  537,  611. 

Rushbrooke,  147,  148. 

Rusticus,  64. 


638 


INDEX   TO    PERSONS   AND    SUBJECTS. 


Sdbatier,  257-262. 

Sacrifices  and Elkesaites,  18, 20, 174. 

Sadducees,  325,  502. 

Sadler,  Mr.,  67,  130. 

Sag-art's,  271. 

Salome,  194,  203. 

Samaria,  375' 

Sunday,  Dr.,  69,206,  264,  275,  277, 
281,  549. 

.Srttow,  439. 

Saturninus,  2O2. 

Sauppe,  419. 

Sayings  of  our  Lord,  202 . 

Schenkel,  415,  524. 

Schleiermacher,  95,  138,  184. 

Schisms,  healing  of,  20  ;  in  Apos 
tolic  times,  292. 

Scholten,  108,  141,    211,    290,    295, 

387. 

Schbttgen,  535. 

Scriptures,  the  word  how  used,  37. 

S«z/,  360,  367,  369. 

Second  Coming,  210,  249,  400,  613, 
619. 

Secundus,  349. 

Self-assertion  of  Jesus,   215,   307. 

Septuagint,  145,  275,  463,  525,  530, 
594-608. 

Serapion,  195. 

Sergius  Paulus,  347. 

Sermon  on  the  Mount,  66,  138,  619. 

Sethites,  477. 

Seufert,  488,  489. 

Seven  Churches,  Epistles  to,  26-31, 
225,  507- 

Sibyl,  244,  373,  537. 

Sz7rtj,  322. 

Silence  of  tradition  as  to  publica 
tion  of  Gospels,  122  ;  of  Apo 
cryphal  Gospels,  as  to  our  Lord's 
public  life,  119,  185;  of  St.John, 
297,  310;  of  fourth  Gospel,  as  to 
St.  John,  62,  289  ;  of  Acts  as  to 
Paul's  Epistles,  344  ;  as  to  mar 
tyrdom  of  Peter  and  Paul,  317, 
336;  of  Eusebius,  88,  95. 


Simon  Magus,  15, 16,  246,  335,  363 

372-376. 

of  Cyrene,  154. 

Sinaitic  MS.  :  see  Codex  N. 

Sixtus  of  Rome,  377. 

2,Kd<pij,  368. 

Smith,  of  Jordan  Hill,  6,  132. 

Socinians,  215. 

Solecisms  of  Apocalypse,  238. 

Solomon,  Psalms  of,  563. 

Sophocles,  301. 

Sophronius,  183. 

Soterof  Rome,  268,  573. 

Sozomen,  562,  564. 

Speaker's    Commentary,   209,    220, 

25S,  264,  345,  389,  415,  439,  542, 

545- 

Stanley,  Dean,  278. 
Stichometry,  178, 199,  363,  473,  559, 

563>  S^S,  609,  620. 
Stobceus,  419. 
Stoicism,  342,  494,  538. 
Stone,  y.,  432. 
Strdbo,  347. 
Strauss,  9,  10,  35,  39,  76,  100,  184, 

214,  306. 
Suetonius,  244. 
Sulpicius  Severus,  8. 
Supernatural  Religion,  9,  40,    77, 

88,  206,  350. 
Supplemental  character  of  fourth 

Gospel,  306. 
Susanna,  604. 
Swete,  403. 
Symeon   of  Jerusalem,    497,    522, 

539- 

Symmachus,  495,  596,  599. 
Syncellus,  527. 
Synoptic   Gospels,     112,    217,    308, 

311  ;  Lects.  vui.,  ix. 
^?20//2'c0rc,Rushbrooke's,  147,  148. 
Syria,  499,  503. 
Syriac  -versions,  248,  477,  528,  573, 

578  :  see  Peshitto. 

Tacitus,  5,  244,  450. 


INDEX   TO    PERSONS   AND    SUBJECTS. 


639 


Talmud,  196,  264,  569,  616. 

Tarsus,  342,  564. 

Tatian,  79-86,  371,  435,  537. 

Taylor,  Jeremy,  75. 

Dr.  C.,  616. 

Teaching  of  Twelve  Apostles,  291, 
405,  514,  581,  611-625. 

Temeluchus,  561,  565. 

Tendency  School,  13,  204. 

Tennyson,  105,  238,  240. 

Terence,  64,  301. 

Tertullian,  42-47,  60, 158,  196,  200, 
201,  205,  211,317,357,381,382, 
457,  465,  467,  484,  496,  5 '9,  527, 
534,  546,  566,  58°,  601,  621  :  see 
Irenceus,  Clement,  and  Tertullian. 

Pseudo-,  148,  229. 

Tertius,  401. 

Tetrapla,  597. 

Thaddceus,  201,  354-357,  522- 

Thamyris,  358. 

Tharshish,  602. 

Thebaic  Version,  459. 

,  349,  357-364,  382,  541- 

594. 
Theodore  of  Mopsuestia,  178,  403, 

530- 

Theodoret,  79,  83,  158,  530. 
Theodotion,  594-608. 
Theophilus  of  Antioch,  62,  77,  79, 

87,  88,  126,  228,  417,  434,  537. 
Theophylact,  248,  421. 
Thessalonians,  Epistles  to,  395-402. 
Thessalonica,  349. 
Thiel,  522. 
Thilo,  352. 
Thirlwall,  9,  301. 
7%0>«fl,  72,  78,  8 1,  393. 
Thomas,  Apostle,  355,  371,  386. 

Gospel  of,    197-199,  476. 

Acts  of,  363-372. 

Thucydides,  133. 
Tiberius,  356. 
Tillemont,  384. 

Timothy,  321,   322,   359,  461:   see 
Pastoral  Epistles. 


Tischendorf,  119,  159,  200,  305, 
352,  375,  378,  384,  386,  565,  597. 

TzVz/j,  322,  449:  see  Pastoral  Epis 
tles. 

Tradition,  Triple,  147-153. 

silence  of,  122. 

Trajan,  253,  290,  422,  480,  489, 
521. 

Travelling  Memoranda,  34 1 . 

Tregelles,  48,  163,  305. 

Trent,  Council  of ,  577,  604. 

Trogyllium,  324. 

Trophimus,  437. 

Tryphcena,  360. 

Turibius,  367. 

Two  Ways,  610,  625. 

Tychicus,  417,  418,  425. 

Tyndale,  606. 

Unleavened  Bread,  269. 
Ur-Markus,^,  119. 
Ussher,  414,  600. 

Valentinus,  58-61,   79,    431,    432, 

567. 

Valerian,  Emperor,  377. 

Variations  of  independent  trans 
lators,  117,  142;  of  Evangelists, 
133. 

Various  readings,  argument  from, 
42,  56,  70,  205. 

Vatican,  377. 

Council,  50,  384. 

Manuscript ;  see  Codex  B. 


Vegetarianism,  203. 

Velleius  Paterculus,  4. 

Veronica,  20 1. 

Versions,  use  of,  57  ;  old  Latin,  477, 

601. 

Vespasian,  246,  252,  570,  608. 
Victor  of  Capua,  82,  85. 

<?/"  Rome,  272,  572,  620. 

Vienne  and  Lyons,   36,  252,   317, 

434,  477,  536,  574- 
Virgin,  marriage  of,  194  ;   assump 
tion  of,  384-386. 


640 


INDEX   TO    PERSONS   AND    SUBJECTS. 


Virginity  of   Mary,    193,    196;    of 

John,  381,  385. 
Vischer,  255-262. 
Vocabulary,  changes  in,  419,  439, 

546- 
Volkmar,   26,   184,   206,   246,   373, 

527. 

Wace,  Dr.,  85. 
Warfield,  549. 
'  We'  sections  of  Acts,  320-328, 

34'- 

Weisse,  445. 
Weizs'dcker,  184,480. 
Westcott,  N.  T.  Canon,   9,   48,  62, 

68,69,99,178,224,393,475,478, 

534,  568- 
Gospels,    176,    1 8  6,    202, 


264,  273. 


St.  John,  209,   241,    255, 


275,  277- 


Westcott,  other  Writings,  158,  178,. 

522,  544- 
Wetstein,  536. 
Whately,  Archbishop,  74. 
Wieseler,  264,  273,  274. 
Wisdom,  description  of,  Prov.  viii.,, 

43,  73- 

Book  of,  464. 

Wordsworth,  Bishop,  463. 
Works,  Good,  507. 
Wright,  W.,  352,  384- 
Wurm,  273. 

Xenophon,  419. 

Zacharias,  death  of,  194,  195. 
Zahn,  44-47,  81,  84,  186,  205,  378- 

383,  390,  39i-395,40i- 
Zeller,  220,  221,  329. 
Zephyrinus,  51,  590. 
Zocer,  521. 


INDEX  TO  PASSAGES  OF  SCRIPTURE  CITED. 


I.— OLD  TESTAMENT. 


GENESIS  iv.  15  

PAGE 
99 

Psalms  i.  I   

PAGE 

.    tfS 

vi.  i    

.    ^27 

iv.  c   . 

xiv.  14 

.    S66 

viii.  6  

463 

xv  6               .  .  . 

98 

xxii.  6  

4.77 

xvii   27 

t;66 

xxiii.  4  

478 

49  c 

xxxiv.  20  

263 

.    3O2 

xl.  6  

Exodus  iii    14 

240 

xii.  9  .  . 

xii   6           

267 

Ixxxvi.  13  

.   478 

46 

.    263 

Ixxxix.  20  

.   3i8 

xxiv  8                  . 

.    308 

xc.  4   

263 

cxviii.  22  

347,  488 

xi   8 

I7e 

cxl.  3    . 

228 

Deut  x.  9  

99 

cxliii.  2   

.  408 

xi    14 

.    4Q8 

cxlvi.  2   

408 

.    2  SO 

Proverbs  iii.  34  

480 

xxi   23           .  .  .  . 

.    49O 

viii.  12,  &c.  . 

43 

.    498 

X.    12. 

480 

xxx   4 

.    498 

xxvi.  II  

r^o 

jr 

.  .  610 

Isaiah  i.  i   

234 

Tosh.ua.  x   20 

.    3Q7 

3   . 

IQ7 

xv.  25  

316 

ii.  i   

.    3O2 

16  

.   60? 

2  Chron  xii.  1  2  

.    397 

vi.  I    

9,  10.  .  .  . 

xxxi.  i    

.    397 

viii.  14.  . 

4.8  c 

XXXVI.  22,  23       .  .  . 

.   604 

xi.  2   

182 

Ezra  i    i 

604 

10  

2IQ 

Nehemiah  i   i                   • 

233 

xxviii.  16  

.    48  C    488 

Q    . 

.    4Q8 

xxxiv.  4  . 

,.    1^38.   rf.t 

2  T 


INDEX   TO    PASSAGES   OF   SCRIPTURE    CITED. 


Tciiflli  vll     8 

PAGE 
4QC 

Daniel  iv.  9,  3  1  

PAGE 

....   607 

•viii    8   T2 

err 

v.  23  

.   60; 

555 

Vi.  22  

594,  595 
.     608 

vii.  — 

.   355 

I,   2,    1C 

234. 

432 

57O 

Ixi   2     .      .. 

q 

605,  606 

60? 

432 

21 

Ixv    2 

619 

viii.  io 

607 

432 

IQ   . 

3Q7 

179 

ix.  — 

600,  608 
....    608 
.    603 

xxi   8   

610 

7-10,  15-18 

24.  . 

.    554 

xl   9 

.    554 

x.  6  .  .          602, 

605,  607 
..   .  601 

Ezekiel  i   6 

38 

IT  

179 

2O.  . 

.  605 

179 

xi.  36  

.    397 

xvii    i  o           . 

.    497 

xii.  3,  12,  21 

....   607 

xviii  —  . 

2O2 

4  . 

6oi 

7    . 

182 

7,  9,  io  .... 
Micah  vii.  6   

600,  605 
.    1  79 

.     525 

Daniel  i.  2   

603 

Hab.  iii.  2   

.    IQ7 

6   

.    234 

3     . 

.    555 

ii.  35 

....  601,  605 

Zech.  xii.  io  

.    27? 

600 

Mai.  iii.  I    

.    145 

iv.  5   

coy 

.    538 

i  Esdrasii.  io 

....    464 

II.—  APOCRYPHA 

603       Wisdom  xii.  io  

2  Esdras  ii  31 

478 

xvi.  21 

461 

viii   3         .    . 

1  08 

Ecclus.  xv.  ii,  12 

.    511 

.    537 

Judith  v.  19 

4Q8 

.   464 

2  Mace.  i.  27               .    . 

.    4Q8 

•   536 

Baruch  i.  15-18   

....    608 

vii.  22,  26  .  . 

464 

ii.  11-16  

....    608 

27.. 

•   495 

i    Bel  and  the  Dragon  .  . 

.    179 

INDEX   TO   PASSAGES   OF   SCRIPTURE   CITED. 


643 


III.— NEW  TESTAMENT. 


PAGE 

Matthew  i.  3,  23 169 

18 37 

21 194 

ii.  — 68 

I  22 

18 70 

iii.  4  142 

iv.  i  179 

5,io 145 

v.  — 138 

8  359 

20 494 

37 500 

48 501 

vi.  16 170 

24 342 

v"-  i,  5,  7 145,  5°o 

18 204 

21 511 

22,  23 21 

26 5OO 

viii.  5,  n,  16  22,  140 

ix.  6,  12 134,  143 

14-17  144 

J5 554 

x.  3  521 

27 21 

32,33,  40....  217,  221 

xi.  10 145 

15 221 

27-29  204,  217 

xii.  13 117,  181 

40 4/8 

50 179 

xiii.  14 275 

32,  43 607 

55 155,  522,  523 

57 312 

xiv.  i  136 

5  285 

33 157 

36 143 


Matthew  xv.  8,  9 145 

xvi.  27 221 

xviii.  3  75 

25 H3 

xix.  21 181 

23,  24 143,  H5 

xx  — 167 

12 498 

23 3*9,  382 

30 219 

xxi.  4  285 

9,15 219 

10,  ii 315 

25 285 

33 H7 

4i 170 

42,  43 24,  488 

44 144 

xxii.  14 108 

23 169 

43 219 

xxiii.  — 623 

12 ' 500 

35 194,  195 

37 316 

xxiv.  — 400 

13,30,42 221 

21 607 

22 145 

30,  31  ..  217,  221,400 

35 562 

xxv.  31 217 

xxvi.  17 263 

64 400 

xxvii.  8,  15,  33,  46  ....  169 

19,  24,  25  23 

49 87 

56 523 

65 218 

xxviii.  15,  19  22,  169 

1 8,  20 217 

Mark  i.  — 152 


T  2 


644 


INDEX   TO    PASSAGES    OF   SCRIPTURE    CITED. 


PAGE 

Mark  i.  2  145 

6  142 

29 105,  155 

30 102 

32 HO 

ii-3,4,17 H3 

10 134 

18-22  144 

iii.  5  "7,154,  157 

7  188 

17 70,  93 

18 521 

21 155 

v.  7  135,  H3 

23,4i  '43 

vi.  3  !55,  52i 

6  157 

14 136 

19 H3 

20 285 

37 3i3 

39 154 

4i 145 

52 157 

vii.6,  7 145 

ix.  14,  36 J54,  155 

47 H3 

x.  16,  17 154 

23,  25 143,  H5 

xi.  i  284 

15 J43 

23 5°° 

3i 285 

xii.  i,  38 117 

xiii.  20 145 

xiv.  5  313 

12 263 

15 145 

62 218,  607 

65 143 

xv.  43 143 

xvi.  i  160 

17,  19 159,313, 

[382 
9-20 156-164 


PAGE 

Lukei.  — 86 

1-5  121,  122 

4  i 

ii.  46 199 

iii.  2,  21,  23 175 

19 136 

iv.  8,  9 145 

'9 3H 

40 140 

44 316 

v.  18,  31 143 

24 134 

33-39  144 

vi.  — .18 


16 

20 

24, 25 
42 

vii.  5 

27 


52i 

500 

501 

145 

22 

H5 

viii.  28 135 

ix.  7  I36 

*6 H5 

3i,  33,  43  -  536,554 

x.  8  346 

18 102 

xi.  — 138 

xii.  — 138 

3  21 

54,  57 498 

xiii.  — 138 

26..  21 


34 


xiv.  —  ..........  138,  167 

xv.  —  ..............  181 

13  ..............  342 

xvii.  26-31  ..........  536 

xviii.  24  ..............  145 

25  ..............  H3 

xix.  29  ..............  285 

xx.  5,  6  ............  285 

9,  46  ............  "7 

18  ..............  144 

xxi.  —  ..............  97 


INDEX   TO    PASSAGES    OF   SCRIPTURE    CITED. 


Luke  xxi.  6 
15 
24 
xxii.  3 

12 


PAGE 

338 
217 

7 
313 

145 

15  ..........    174,  263 

43,  44  ..........     70 

60  ..............  218 

xxiii.  51  ..............   316 

28  ..............  22 

xxiv.  12  ..............   313 

39  ..............    186 

49,  51  ......    3I3,3H 

John  i.  1-3  ......    72-84,  222 

n  ..............  207 

13  ..............   236 

14  ......  209,236,284 

25  ..............   276 

28  ..............  278 

29  ......  222,235,285 

32,  40,  42  ......  3°° 

33  ..............  175 

34  ..............  304 

44  ......  105,  278,286 

45,  46..  279,  298,  300 

ii.  —  ..............  81 

i,  1  1  .  208,  278,  284,  287 
5  ..............  276 

II,  17,  22,  23..  284,  287 
13,23  ..........   276 

16  ..............  207 

20  ..........  279,  302 

24  ..............  312 

iii.  3  ............  75,3" 

4  ..............  302 

5  ............  75,236 

13,  I5-.  223,300,311 
14  ..............  208 

17  ..............  209 

23  ..............  278 

24  ..............  3°° 

25  ..............  276 

29  ..............  237 

35  ..............  222 

iv.  6  .         .  286 


PAGE 

John  iv.  9  276 

ii 278 

15 303 

22 207,277 

24 81 

27,33 277,287 

35,  46 278 

42 209 

44 312 

52 286 

v.  i  276 

l8,  23 220,  222 

24 209 

28 210 

32,33 283 

39,  46 207 

vi.  — 3°9 

2,4 276,310 

7,9," 286,304 

7-15....  280,306,313 

23 312 

32 208,  236 

41 278 

42,  70 3°° 

47,  5i,  53  222 

52 278,303 

55 309 

62 222,300,311 

7i 312 

vii.  i 278 

15 277 

22 6l 

24 236 

27,3! 6l,282 

35,  36..  277,  302,  498 

37 236,27 

41,42,49-52....  279, 
[282,  298,  304 

viii.  15 97 

20..         .286 


34...- 
39-... 
48.... 

51-55 
56.... 


537 
235 
276 

237 

207 


646 


INDEX   TO    PASSAGES    OF   SCRIPTURE    CITED. 


PAGE 

John  viii.  58 222 

ix.  1-3 76,  176 

2  277 

x.  7,27 76 

n 236 

14-17  222 

16 

22,23 276,286 

41 285 

xi.  2  304 

16 286,  287 

18 278,  304 

25 222 

44 236 

48 281 

49-52.... 235, 277,  303 

54 278,287 

55 276 

xii.  2,  5 313 

16 284 

21 286 

3i,  34 282 

35 ,.  209 

40 275 

41 207,  236 

xiii.  i  263,  276 

3,8  236 

ii 312 

17 5°° 

18 275 

22,23,24  272,287,294 

27 3i3 

29  263,  287 

xiv.  5,  8 286 

6,  10,  14,  20  ....  222 

22 286,  521 

23 222,237 

XV.  5,9,20  ....  222,  237 

xvi.  7  313 

17 287 

20 209 

33 236 

xvii.  3 209,  222 

5,  10 222 

6  237 


John  xviii.  2  287 

10 286 

13 277 

14 304 

15 287,294 

16 300 

28 263,  276 

33 188 

xix.  12 74,  281 

21 303 

26 287 

3i 276 

35 284,  304,  305 

36,37..  208,  263,275 

39 304 

xx.  2,  3 286,  287,  294 

17 300,  3" 

19,  25 287 

27 283 

28,  29 222,  355 

31 131,222,312 

xxi.  — 86,  210,  304 

2  278 

3,  7 287,294 

8,  9 304 

12 484 

15, l6, 17 236 

18 539 

19 294 

20,  22  ..    211,287,304 

24.. 284, 287,304,305 
25   290,  305 

Acts  i.  5   325 

9  314 

13 521 

!7,  18  545 

21 I2O 

23 364 

»•  20 545 

23 347,  545 

24  3l8 

32 490 

42,46 308 

iii.  i  294 

12 545 


INDEX   TO   PASSAGES   OF   SCRIPTURE    CITED. 


647 


PAGE 

Acts  iii.  15,  18  ..........  490 

iv.  i  ..............  376 

11  ..........  347,  488 

12  ..............  318 

18,  21  ..........  545 

28  ..............  347 

32  ..............  625 

36  ..............  466 

v.  17,  28  ......  326,  545 

30  ..............  490 

39  ..............  326 

42  ..............  112 

vi.  I  ..............  468 

5  ..............  325 

vii.  38  ..............  98 

58  ..............  325 

viii.—  ......  17,338,373 

i  ..............  325 

14  ..............  294 

18  ..............  17 

40  ..............  325 

58  ..............  466 

ix.  7  ..............  133 

27  ..........  332,  466 

30,  35  ......  325,  466 

x.27  ..............  545 

33  ..............  554 

38  ..............  116 

39,  42,  43  ........  49° 


42  ..............  347 

47  ..............  325 

ix.  16,  19  .........  ,325 

20  ..........  112,  466 

22,  25  ..........  325 

28  ..............  323 

30  ..............  466 

xii.  2  ..............  287 

12  ..............  467 

13  ..............  347 

17  ..............  497 

25  ............  ..  466 

xiii.  2  ..............  466 

5  ..............  330 

7  ..............  347 


PAGE 

Acts  xiii.  13 325,  349 

22 318 

39 334 

44,  46,  5°  466 

46 331 

5i 349 

xiv.  6  349 

12 466 

xv. —..403,  404,  497,  504 

i  506,  510 

5,  9 325,  326 

ii 505 

19 5io 

20,  25,  29  28 

22,  25  466 

28,38 325 

xvi.  4  28,  325 

6,  10 411 

9  323 

12,  20 349 

15 291 

xvii.  — 342-344,  395 

5  291 

6  349 

14 325,397 

19-34  342-344 

xviii.  i,  19  498 

5  325,345,395 

6  342 

12 348 

14 479 

20 315 

23 4ii 

24 465 

25 285,545 

xix.  3  285 

9  545 

27 554 

38 348 

xx.— 445 

4,  5.- 322,  325, 349, 396 

6  269 

16 315,  324 

17 324 

19-35  342 


648 


INDEX   TO    PASSAGES   OF   SCRIPTURE    CITED, 


PAGE 

,  .  338,  444 

Romans  v.  3    .... 

PAGS 
CQO 

28  

.  .  4IC,  4CI 

vi.  6-8 

408 

20.  . 

.    3l8 

7  •  • 

A87 

34.  . 

416 

10  

.   40O 

•2C 

.  106,  318 

16  

xxi.  — 

338,  471,  s6o 

vii.  23 

408.   croo 

4,  10     . 

.   324 

viii.  17,  18  .. 

222,  408,  487 

8,  16    . 

.  .201,  32i; 

29  

.    463 

18 

?23    407 

34.  . 

.     163 

20  

,  .  317,  326 

ix.  3   . 

.    333 

21 

.    471 

c    . 

222 

24    2? 

28  331 

7,  8 

4O7 

*TI  *  j  •  • 

26 

.  32S 

25,  33  .  , 

.    486 

2Q 

•22C    437 

xi.  13.  . 

.    4OO 

18 

.    3^1 

xii.  —  

463 

xxii.  — 

34-3 

I,  2    

486,  557 

20 

32C. 

6,  7 

.  486 

xxiii.  9 

326 

9   

463 

26  

.    327 

10-19  •  • 

291,  463,  486 

xxiv    1  8 

32C 

xiii.  —  

.  246 

XXV.   II  

.    32^ 

i,  3,  4.. 

.  .  .  .  479,  486 

2C 

442 

9   

.  408 

xxvi    1  8 

33d 

xiv.  2   

.  283 

32 

32  EC    442 

9   

222 

xxvii  — 

6    323 

19.  . 

.    463 

2 

306 

XV.   IO  

464 

xxviii.  3-9 

7    32Q 

12  

219 

7 

34Q 

19  

....    290,  364 

16 

323 

27  

....    624 

17 

3d. 

33  

.  .  .  .   413,  463 

Romans  i   4 

34.4. 

xvi.  —  

413 

8 

3Q7 

3   

498 

17 

4.63 

14  

579 

ii   13 

COQ 

20-27   .  • 

413 

16 

I  IO 

21  

396 

I7_27 

so6 

23  

....  291-295 

2  C-27 

CQQ 

25  

no,  413-415 

28 

3O 

i  Cor.  i.  12  

.  300 

iii.  i       . 

277 

ii.  3   . 

.  410 

2     

08 

4    „ 

.    307 

2O  

.    408 

6  

.   463 

22,  24   . 

222 

iii.  2 

307   463 

28  

22 

222     3OO 

iv.  19  

463 

iv  6 

4IO 

v.  1,9,  10. 

7    . 

.    SOO 

INDEX   TO    PASSAGES    OF   SCRIPTURE    CITED. 


649 


Cor  iv  9 

PAGE 
.  4-72 

2  Cor.  viii.  23  

PAGE 
.  6l4 

14. 

.  3QQ 

24  . 

.  463 

v  7 

224,  27O 

ix.  6  

.  4IO 

o  ii 

3QQ,  4O2 

xi.  2,  4  . 

4.IO,  4^2 

vi  4 

7c 

•2 

98 

vii  — 

.  287 

9.  IO    3-K, 

397,  416 

.  £.09 

13 

31 

II  

.  'JI'J 

22  

...  468 

19  

.  .  .  .  4IO 

24,  2  C.  . 

346,  397 

29.  . 

.  359 

410,  $64 

.  .  .  .  222 

21  

.  ^24 

ix.  c. 

.  3OO 

xiii.  i  2 

4IO,  46^ 

.  624 

c  14 

.  222 

1C 

.  4l6 

II 

399 

20 

.  333 

Gtilatians  — 

4O4—  4  1  3 

x  — 

C.24 

j  i 

222 

I  

.  .  .  .   98 

6  

.  399 

27  

.  346 

10 

.  307 

.  397 

18 

.  334 

8  

98 

19 

4Q7,  ^21 

20  . 

.  308 

ii  9       28, 

•200,  4Q7 

23 

.  346 

ii 

16 

xiv.  16  

....  369 

12    

342,  497 

26  

.  °5Q2 

13  . 

334 

33.  . 

.  399 

16,  20  . 

222,  408 

xv.  3,  c.  7.. 

.34,  300 

iii  6 

4°  7 

6,  7-...  178, 

346,  5H 
.  43O 

13  ....  222, 

16  

410,  490 

.  464 



2C  . 

.  .  .  .  222 

IQ.  .    .  .  4O7, 

463,  C26 

26  27 

462,  463 

27 

.  222 

77,  7C  .  , 

.  ^09 

iv.  21  

....   98 

CO.  . 

.  304 

26  

29 

C2.  . 

.  4OO 

28,  30  

.  4O7 

xvi.  7  , 

.  463 

v.  ,3  342, 

410,  co6 

8  

.  269 

10  

.  399 

I?  . 

.  342 

13.  . 

486,  £.24 

IQ,  2O 

471,  486 

20  .   .  . 

437 

2  Cor.  — 

409,  416 

vi.  7 

4IO.  C.O9 

ii.  17. 

397 

399 

iv.  c. 

112 

16  

3O 

V.  II  17,  21 

4IO 

Eph.  i.  —  .  . 

426  433 

vi.  2,  16 

463  464 

i 

2OC, 

vii.  2  

.  397 

3-14.  .  .  .  426, 

433,  487 

viii.  6  

.  4IO 

7  

.  .  .  .  222 

9  . 

.  222 

10.. 

.  439 

650 


INDEX   TO    PASSAGES    OF    SCRIPTURE    CITED. 


PAGE 

Eph.  i.  20-22.  75, 163,  222, 487 

23 432 

ii.  2-9 222,  439 

II 30,431 

18 222,  488 

19 428 

20-22   .  .  426,  432,  488 
iii.  I-9.  423-428,  430-433 

9-1 1 488 

16-20  . .  426,  433,  488 

iv.  1-4 423-427 

8-10 464,  478,  488 

13-27 439 

16-25 427,  432 

17-3°..-  342,  424-426 

V.  5     222 

14 464 

15-25    427 

25-29 424 

vi.  ii,  13   439 

21,  22 425 

23 439 

Phil.  i.  i  415,  450 

ii 5°9 

15 "2 

18 416 

19,  15-26  . .  442,  443 

ii.  6,  7,  10    222 

5-11 420 

24 442 

25 614 

iii.  2   30 

5  326,468 

9  335 

12 558 

19 524 

20 558 

iv.  3   415,416,575 

8-19 416 

H 554 

16 345,396 

Colossians  i. — 73 

1-26 427 

7  417 

9,  10    439 


Colossians  i.  15 416,  433,  558 

15-18.... 221, 222,  433 
ii.  2,  4  ....  426,  439,  509 

8,  7,  19   426 

ii  30 

21 202 

iii.  1-16    163,  426 

4,  10    439 

iv.  5-8 425,  426 

10-13396,418,449,467 

14 143,322 

16  ....  402,  410,  426 

21 449 

i  Thess.  i.  1-3  396,  595 

i,  5,  6,  8 397 

9 396,  399 

ii.  4,  5,  6>  7 397 

9  397,398,  416 

14-16.... 278,  396,397 

iii.  6.  ii   222,  395 

iv.  ii,  12 399 

13-18 395,  400 

v.  2  499 

6  486 

8  439 

12 4r5 

21 177 

23 509 

2  Thess.  i.  7,  8  260 

ii.  — 398,  402 

1-12 399,  401 

2-n  398,  399 

8  439 

14 no 

iii.  3  416 

4,8,10,12,13,  I6..398 

[399 

17 402 

iv.  14 399 

I  Tim.  i.  i,  4,  14  439 

17 434 

ii.  4,  5 222,  439 

14  98 

iii.  2 291,  450 

iv.  3  202,  283 


INDEX   TO    PASSAGES    OF    SCRIPTURE   CITED. 


651 


i  Tim.  iv.  12 

PAGE 

.  439,  441 

Hebrews  x.  12  

PAGE 
•   163 

v.  10  .  .  .  . 

,  .  291 

">.  28,  38 

.  .  467,  464 

vi.  ii.  ... 

.  439 

33-37  .  . 

461,  472,  473 

20..  .. 

.  422 

xi.  —  

.  t;o8 

2  Tim.  i.  10  

.  462 

12,  n  .  , 

,  .  463,  48? 

13.  ... 

.  439 

33. 

roc. 

15-18 

.  44  c 

xii.  —  .  . 

473 

17 

3Cq,  477 

2  4  . 

16^,  460-47"? 

ii.  8 

no 

II 

co8 

22,  2? 

430 

H—  17 

463  464 

iii.  7  . 

430 

2O 

342 

iv.  I  .... 

.  490 

xiii.  1-3  .  .  .  . 

282,  46^,  47O 

6-8  ... 

.  221,  439 

c,  7  .  . 

,  .   463,  464 

9-22.  . 

.  .44^-4^0,  4QQ 

13  .  . 

48l 

ii.  ... 

.  322 

20  

463 

16  

,  .  443,  461 

23 

462  468 

iq.  . 

408 

24 

472 

20.  ... 

.  477 

Tames  i.  i  . 

Titus  i.  i,  7 

m4CO 

3.  4,  c 

480  coo  co  i 

8,  14  . 

.  2QI,  437 

TC.OO 

ii.  14 

.  SK 

6  

408 

iii.  8  .... 

.  ^06 

7,  8 

40  C 

10.  .  .  . 

437 

n  .. 

4QO  408 

Philemon  22  .... 

442 

12 

221  COI  607 

24.  . 

.  .  322,  396,  448 

13.  . 

CTI 

464 

ic,  17  . 

COO,  ^.lO 

2  .  .  .  . 

.  .  4CC,  463 

22  

coo,  coo 

•i  . 

.  .  16^,  4^4,  464 

2C 

coo 

4,  6,  7, 

13.  ..  .454,463, 

26,  27  . 

,  .  49C,  ci7 

[464,  cc8 

ii.  —  

co3 

ii  2 

464 

I 

C  12 

•j 

460  471 

2 

4.QC  d.QQ  CQ2 

8,  14.  . 

462,  463 

c 

coo 

0,  17.  . 

.  .  4CC,  ^8 

6,  7 

40  C  4QQ  CI2 

iii.  I  .... 

.  4C4 

8 

4Q4  COO 

iv.  12.  .  .  . 

73 

IO—  12 

COO  CIO 

v.  12,  14. 

.  .  .  98,  463,  471 

13  .  . 

406 

vi.  —  .... 

457,  470 

18..  . 

coo 

3,  10. 

463,  469 

21  

400 

4  .  .  .  . 

.  Co9 

23 

406 

16.... 

.  4CC 

24 

COC 

viii.  1,6.. 

.  163,  1:26 

2C 

400  CO8 

10  

.  463 

iii.  2 

40  C. 

ix.  28  .... 

4  . 

408 

x.  — 

472 

II,  12  . 

.  498 

652 


INDEX   TO    PASSAGES    OF    SCRIPTURE    CITED. 


PAGE 

James  iii.  15-18  495,  509 

iv.  i-io 489,  495,  501 

ii,  12 495>  5oo 

13,  i6 496,  499 

17 5io 

v.  1-6  495,  501 

4,™ 499 

7,  8,9  ..498,  508,  512 

ii,  12 495,  5°° 

13 492 

14,  15 512 

17 498 

i  Peter  i.  2  347 

3-12 488,491 

7  236,  489,  557 

10-13  . .  236,  488,  490 

14 485-487,  544 

18 236,  557 

19 236,544 

20 347,488 

22 236 

23 236,491 

24 490 

ii.  2  544 

4-7  347,  468 

5  236,  487 

6-8 347,  486 

9-10.... 236, 485,  544, 

[555,  557 

12 544 

13,  14,  16.. ..  486-488 

20 479,  491 

24 490 

25 557 

i".  2  544 

4  488 

8,9 486 

18. . ....  236,  488,  490 

19,  20  .  .  477,i488,  491 

21 491,  544 

22 163,  488 

iv.  i  487,  544 

3  362,485 

4  557 

5  490 


i  Peter  iv.  9  291 

10,  n,  13....  98,486, 
[487 

12 491 

16 479 

19 557 

v.  i  294,  487,  490 

2,  3 236,  492 

4,  5  ....  221,  342,  490 

8  486 

9  49i 

13..  92,  236,  294,483, 

[484 

14 486 

2  Peter  i.  i,  7 544,  545 

3-5 544,  555 

8,  9 544 

10-16  539,  545 

12 554 

15 536 

17 538 

18 539 

19,  21 537 

ii.  i-3  ....  535,  544,  553 
4,  5,  8  . .  342,  530-536 

7-9  544,  545 

12 544 

13-15...-  28,  544,545 

16,  18 544,  545 

19 537,  544 

21,  22 530,545 

iii.  i  478,  539 

5-7  544 

8  535 

9  537 

10 500,  538,  545 

11,12,  14....  537,544 

15 28,390,  539 

16 544 

i  John  i.  i  283,  284 

3-5  80 

4  2°9 

7  222 

ii.  2,  5 222,  237 

11-13 209,  236 


INDEX   TO   PASSAGES   OF   SCRIPTURE   CITED. 


653 


PAGE 

I  John  ii.  18-28  211 

iii.  i  78 

3-9 222>  236 

12-14  209>  236 

iv.  3  283,  293 

4  236 

9,14 2°9 

13 222 

v.  4  236 

6 210 

i5-20  3°5 

24 2°9 

2  John — ..211,  236,  292-295 

3  John  — 291-295 

i2 305 

Judei,  4,  1 7.. 5 19,  522,  524 

6  525 

7,8 27,523 

9  525 

ii 27 

i2,  13  523-525 

14-16  527,  528 

20 342,  528 

Rev.  i.  i,  6,  9 234,  236 

5  433 

7  221,236,  607 

8,  17  220 

10 256 

14 606 

16 237 

ii.  2  26,  396 

4,  5 3i 

7,  11,17. .221,236,257 
9  26 

IO 221,  5OI 

14,  15 26 

16,27 256 

20-22  524 

23,  26 221 

iii.  3  22I>  5°° 

5,  12,21.. 221, 236,  257 

8-10 26,  236 

9,  i2 26,  239 

14,21..  219,  220,  235, 

[433 


Rev.  iii.  18,  20 
v.  i-  . • 


PAGE 
236 
228 


6,  9..  29,  219,  235,236 
9-H  ............  256 

i2,  13  ......  2I9,  236 

vi.  4,  9  ............  236 

9,  10  ..........  255 

vii.  4-8  ............  29 

9-17  ............  256 

14,  15  ..........  236 

ix.  20  ..............  605 

x.  4  ..............  29° 

5  ..............  605 

7  ..............  433 

8  ..........  259,  260 

xi.  2  ..........  251,  261 

8  ..........  3°»  256 

12  ..............  311 

15  ..........  259,  260 

xii.  7  ..............  605 

ii,  12  ......  236,  256 

xiii.  7  ..............  605 

3,6,8,12,14....  236, 
[244 

n  ..............  246 

xiv.  8,  12  ........  236,  239 

xvi.  12  ..............  245 

15  ..............  500 

xvii.  5  ..............  235 

6  ......  255,  261,472 

10,  n  ......  243,  244 

16,  17  ......  246-251 

xviii.  20,  24..  236,  255,  261 
xix.  6  ..............  605 

7  ..........  237,432 

ii  ..............  260 

13  ..............  235 

16  ..........  219,  607 

20  ..........  246,  257 

XX.  2  ..............  239 

4  ..............  605 

6  ......  220,236,257 

ii  ..............  605 


INDEX   TO    PASSAGES    OF    SCRIPTURE    CITED. 


PAGE 

Rev.  xxi.  2   ....29,232,237,432 

3   236 

6  252 

7  236 

8   257 


9,H. 


PAGE 

Rev.  xxii.  1,3 220 

2   232 

7,9    237 

13,   l6 219,      220 

17    236,433 

18,    19  225 


THE    END. 


Printed  at  THE  UNIVERSITY  PRESS,  Dublin. 


BY    THE    SAME    AUTHOR. 


MACMILLAN  &  CO.,  LONDON  AND  NEW  YORK. 


NON-MIRACULOUS   CHRISTIANITY, 

AND   OTHER   SERMONS, 


PHEACHED    IN    THE 


0f 


GNOSTICISM    AND    AGNOSTICISM, 

AND  OTHER  SERMONS. 


BS 
Sain  on,  George  2330 

.334  • 

An  historical  intro.  to  the  study 
of  the  books  of  the  New  Testament